Physics and Force at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

We really like volunteering at the Children's Museum. It fits our varied skill sets and energies well, and I've been profoundly changed by the simple environment of respect and empowerment shared with even the youngest of us that exists there. Even the youngest of us is spoken to and with respectfully, as equals. Even the youngest of us is given big responsibilities, and empowered to fulfill them. And on this particular day, the not-quite-youngest of us was enlisted with a very big responsibility, and empowered to fulfill it all on her own.

Look at my big kid, running all by herself a tabletop activity at the world's largest children's museum:


She was completely in charge of this tabletop demonstration of centrifugal force. There are three settings on that Hot Wheels track, by means of which children could experiment with force and acceleration and evaluate how they affected the Hot Wheels car's ability to loop the loop.

When asked later, she claims that her main takeaway is that 55% of children, when presented with a button that you're obviously meant to push, attempted to pull it instead. I, however, sneaked many looks at her as she led everyone from toddlers to teens older than she through the activity, and just between us, I'll tell you that she took away a lot more than that. This kid is confident, and knowledgeable, and funny, gentler with those younger and smaller than she, unabashed when speaking to those older and bigger. She's growing up just the way I'd hoped she would.

Syd and I ran a less exciting table, charged with interesting and engaging children in the concept of the inclined plane, and a comparison of linear motion with rotational motion on that plane. The opening concept is kind of a yawner: you've got two inclined Hot Wheels tracks set up, and a couple of stacked Duplo bricks and a Hot Wheels car to test them on. Kid comes up, you ask Kid if Kid wants to play a game, Kid says yes because duh, you tell Kid you're going to race and Kid can choose to be the block or the car, Kid chooses, you race, you extrapolate on potential energy, linear motion vs. rotational motion, friction, etc.

After a couple of iterations, Syd and I found ways to make this game more fun, though, and more leveled, because leveling tabletop activities is very important when you've got an audience of anyone and everyone. Block vs. Car is pretty great for preschoolers and kindy types, but for younger preschoolers and toddlers, a much better game goes something like, "Can you make the car go down the ramp? Wow! Can you make the block go down the ramp? Ooh, I saw you had to do something different to make the block go down!" and then just let them tool around with cars and blocks and ramps until they're done or their parents drag them away.

For older kids, and especially for school groups, you play out Block vs. Car, getting the rest of the kids to be the judges if there's a ton of them crowded around your table, but then you start to add on challenges. Round #2 allows the kid in charge of Block to do anything she wants, short of injuring competitors or bystanders, to give Block the advantage. Car can't do anything differently. The kid will usually change the angle of Block's track, or push Block to get it to move faster. One kid, who I flat-out told is a genius, also flipped Block over so that only the pegs were touching the track, not the flat side. When Block wins, you ask the kid what she did differently and talk about why that worked. Switch players if you can, and Round #3 can either be a no-holds-barred race in which both Car and Block can try to get their pieces to win, or you can do another round of Block only, but Block has to do something different from what was done last time. If you change the rules slightly for every round, even teenagers will excitedly play round after round after round. It was pretty amusing to be a part of.

I completely forgot to take photos of our table, but here's, like, two seconds of us goofing around when we were between visitors:



I often joke with the kids that wherever we are, I'm the nerdiest one in the room, so they are always extra thrilled when they see that I've found a nerdy soulmate. As we were packing up our activities, we were discussing Hot Wheels with the museum staffer who was in charge of us. I mentioned that when I was my kids' age, my prize possession was a Hot Wheels recreation of the General Lee. He then told me that in his friend's latest Loot Crate, she'd gotten a Hot Wheels recreation of the '67 Impala from Supernatural. I was all, "I LOOOOVE Supernatural!," and he was all, "Oh, really? Do you want to see pics of my Supernatural cosplay?"

I may have asked him to be my best friend. Also, yes, of COURSE I wanted to see pics of his Supernatural cosplay! The kids looked on with benign bemusement as the staffer and I discussed conventions and cosplay and how you can't spray paint foam when making your costume weapons, because the foam will melt, and also people who obsess over avoiding anachronisms in their cosplay are fine, UNTIL they begin to nitpick your cosplay, which isn't meant to be bound to one specific scene from one specific genre, ugh.

It's possibly a little odd how often I find myself looking at some stranger's cosplay pics on their phone, but it's one of my great pleasures.

The kids don't always want to hang out at the museum the way they used to when they were small, but on this day, they seemed determined to embody the idea that since they'd just Worked Hard, it was time for them to Play Hard, and they spent the whole dang rest of the day there, playing like toddlers.

Don't believe me? Here they are in the Ice Cream Shoppe, last visited with this much enthusiasm when they were six and eight:


Here is Syd's Smilosaurus:


And here is Will in the gift shop:



We have a friend who works there, and after I complained to her that "ugh, these kids always have to look at every single thing every single time we come!" she was all, "Well, of course! Ooh, come look at the new stuff we got in!" And there were friends in the Paleo Lab window to chat with, and the kids just had to go to the program on hadrosaurs--





--and if we're down in Dinosphere we might as well see everything else, too--




--and of course we had to go to the racing exhibit, because it IS Indy 500 week and we ARE in Indianapolis--



--but I think everyone had the most fun visiting the newest exhibit, themed around the circus.

This is a baby Rola Bola:


Here's how the professionals do it.

Here's a baby Roman ladder:







--and here's how the professionals do it!

My sore arms attest that the Roman ladder is great for the biceps.

We have lately been obsessed with Philippe Petit, from both The Man Who Walked Between the Towers and Man on Wire. I think I'm going to spring for a beginner's slackline kit, although Syd would prefer to start straightaway with a tightrope, but we were all pretty excited to see this baby tightrope:



And here's how a professional does it!

And if you've ever been to the Children's Museum, you know that you obviously can't get away without riding the carousel:


Our volunteer badges let us ride for free, and on this day the children took full advantage of that. I sat on a bench by the domino table and read several chapters of my book, looking up every now and then to watch my two race to choose their favorite steeds, happily ride away, then exit at the end and race around to the beginning to do the same thing over and over and over again. I'd look up to find them mid-ride, their heads bent together in discussion, or at the beginning of the ride, jostling between each other to see who could get to the stag first. I swear, they were having a better time than most of the toddlers.

I love this about the Children's Museum, or homeschooling, or maybe simply my kids. They're both mature and immature, in control and absolutely silly, working hard and playing hard. They feel capable of giving their best to an often wearying, often tedious job for two full hours, and they feel able to spend the next three goofing off and having fun, occasionally side-by-side with a small child they'd been instructing just that morning. How many other kids their ages do you know who can genuinely be themselves in that way, who can let all of the facets of who they are shine in one setting, with the same people?

Heck, how many adults do you know who can do that?

The Water Cycle at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Although it's been a while since we've been able to volunteer in the Paleo Lab, due to Victor's long illness and passing, I keep on the lookout for one-shot volunteer opportunities with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, and as a whole it's been a rewarding strategy, as it encourages us to do things, primarily involving working with the young visitors, that we don't generally do in the Paleo Lab.

On this particular day, we were going to volunteer at the museum's After School Night, a special event just for children in various non-profit school-age programs around the city, and for the neighborhood's children (one of the best things about the Children's Museum is the deliberate interest that it takes in improving the quality of life of those who live in the surrounding neighborhood, an area of clear economic disparity compared to the rest of the city).

But of course if we're going to be in the museum anyway, we might as well go early to play!

And of course our first stop in the museum isn't even the museum proper, but the branch of the public library that lives in the museum:

How many other public libraries do YOU know that live inside a museum?

You might remember that we're doing a fast and loose meteorology unit currently, which means that we've been reviewing the water cycle. Remember our cloud in a jar demonstration?

It was just a happy coincidence, then, that most of our museum play happened to be related to that unit. First, as much as the kids miss the giant construction area that used to be in the old ScienceWorks exhibit, they LOVE the new, expansive water table, and they especially love it when they have it all to themselves!

Then, we timed it just right so that we were able to pop into a lesson in the SciencePort. These are always fun, but on this day, the theme was the water cycle, and the scientist had us play probably the funnest water cycle game that's ever been played (Incredible Journey, here). I especially loved this game because it dug into more than just the basics of the water cycle, covering how water is lodged in glaciers, in plants, in animals, in aquifers, etc.

The kids especially loved this game because it involved beads!

Okay, I especially loved this part, too, as you can tell when you see my own water cycle bracelet there at the bottom of the image. Every station had a different color of bead, and a die. You collected the bead for your station, then rolled the die to see where your water went next. At the end of the game, then, you had a record of everywhere your water had been. The die were loaded so that your water naturally went more often to the places where water more often is, so it was a surprisingly sophisticated model of the water cycle.

And yes, we did eventually get around to doing our actual volunteering:

By yet another happy coincidence, Dinosphere was the gallery of choice for After School Night, and we took over the perfect table for us, that of demonstrating and practicing with real paleontology tools. Well... the tools weren't *exactly* real, as you can't give small children clam shuckers and machetes and x-acto knives and Paleobond, but the experience was surprisingly close, and we were able to tell the children lots of additional details that we know from our experience at the dino dig. My favorite trick was to say, "Raise your hand if you've ever glued yourself to a fossil!" Will, Syd, and I would raise our hands, and all the children at our table would go "Wow!" and "Cool!" and "Awesome!" and such.

It was fun.

I always forget how stressful this month is until it sneaks up on me and smacks me on the head, so I'm always worried that the rigorous education that I try to stuff into my kids' brains suffers during this month, as I have more of my attention on the intricacies of Girl Scout cookie booth scheduling and Syd's Trashion/Refashion Show garment than on our weekly work plans. Days like this, however, reassure me. We didn't do math or grammar or review Greek and Roman deities, but we did listen to two hours of Al Capone Shines My Shoes, do some reading, review the water cycle, practice our pedagogy and people skills, and perform some service.

And I was home in time that night to rearrange cookie booth schedules, run the percentages for a Cookie Cupboard order, prepare a bank deposit to our troop account, and fall into bed with pizza, wine, a movie, and a heartburn pill.

A Visit to St. Nick, and the Christmas That I'm Enduring

I had a different kid a year ago. I had a kid who I bribed to do her schoolwork. Who took every instruction, whether it be "brush your hair" or "please pick up that piece of paper from the floor" as an invitation for a fight to the death.

Who refused to visit Santa.

This year, that same kid sits down and completes all of her schoolwork every day without prompting. She has her moments, but she's a genuine help most days. She even brushes her hair!

The other kid, mind you, hit her tweens the second that she turned ten, and she's now my kid who sneaks out of her schoolwork and wanders off to play when she's given a chore.

But she's still very much a kid at heart--they both are, really--and this year, hallelujah, I was able to get them both over to Santa's couch for a nice little visit:

It was a Christmas miracle.

Of course, you can't visit Santa at the Children's Museum without doing all the other stuff at the Children's Museum, too!

I didn't realize something until we were in the dino dig pit for the thousandth time in the children's lives and a friend whom we'd met there asked me how this set-up is different from the real dino dig site. I looked around us, blinked in surprise, and said, "Huh. Not much, actually!" The experience of digging, chipping off the matrix from the fossils, is pretty similar to what it's really like to expose fossils in the field. The walls around the pit contain a 360-degree panorama of what actually does seem to be our South Dakota dig site. And outside the dig pit is a wall with more fossils to chip out, and those fossils are embedded into a bank that is just about identical to the actual bank that we actually dug actual fossils out of!

Every Christmas, and again in February, the museum transforms its stairway into a slide!

Last year, one of these kids would NOT ice skate on the pond.

This year, however?

Yeah, she seemed to feel okay about letting loose.

 This one's always okay with letting loose!

I'm not going to lie--this Christmas is hard. I feel guilty every time I mention how hard this year as a whole has been for me, because there have also been so many amazing and wonderful things. I mean, how petty does someone have to be to call a year in which they went on a cruise to Alaska "hard"? It feels gross to call it such. Babies are dying in Aleppo. I'm lucky and I know it.

And yet... this year has been hard. This Christmas is hard. Not even a minute ago, in response to something casually cruel that Will said (despite her attitude change, she *is* still a tween...), I looked up from this computer and said to her, "I'm not going to tell you that you can't feel the way that you do, because you can, but I will tell you that you're feeling that way because you're immature. I would give so much to be able to see my grandparents again, and one day, when you're more mature and it's too late, you're going to feel the exact same way."

The last time that I saw my grandfather was last Christmas.

So I'm really not trying to make this "the best Christmas ever" or any of that other crap. I'm just trying to get through it. I'm putting on my game face as well as the holiday music. I'm faking it until I make it. I'm doing all of the other cliches that describe what you do when you need to make something great for your kids while you, yourself, are feeling deeply sad.

It's a fortunate thing, though, that when you deliberately try to give happiness to your kids, they have a tendency, the little ice skaters and Santa's lap sitters and pretend dino diggers, to give it right back to you.

Homeschool Field Trip: Children's Museum of Indianapolis

Just in case you were happy, be forewarned that I'm in kind of a bummer mood today. I miss Mac so deeply, all the time, that I get used to it, until I have something that I want to tell him, or something happens that he'd think was funny. Fugazi comes on my Spotify. Someone else shares a memory or a photograph on his Facebook. Or maybe nothing happens to instigate it; maybe I just miss him desperately all of a sudden.

Sometimes, then, I make a mental list of all the people whom I would rather have had a brain tumor instead of Mac. It starts off easy. Evil people, for sure. Donald Trump. That guy who shot Trayvon Martin. And then I add all the people whom I hate. My former next door neighbor. Most of my former bosses.

The trick is to distract myself and move away from the activity before I go much farther, because my best friend from seventh grade? Sure, I’d sacrifice her for Mac. That cousin whom I really like but also haven’t really seen in a few years? I could do without her, if I could have Mac instead. It’s a stupid game, because I love Mac more than almost anyone else, and it’s stupid that you can’t actually burn the world down to get back someone whom you love.

Of course, if one could do that, we’d all be dead a thousand times over from the people who would happily sacrifice us to save their own precious ones.

Okay, deep breath, because I have a lot to do today, and I really don't have time to grieve until I've gotten four people packed for two completely different vacations in two different climate zones, partly with clothing that we do not yet own. Also, we need to mow the lawn, clean out the chicken coop and yard, and I need to write something like six Crafting a Green World posts and adjust the shipping times on every one of my etsy items...

Argh, this is not better! Another deep breath...

How about I show you some photos from the day that we spent at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis this week? We spent half of it in training, as we are now official volunteers of the museum and will be working in the Paleo Lab starting next month, and I know all the secret stairways, and can help you if you've lost your adult, and can lead you to evacuation in an emergency. The other half of the day, though, we spent happily exploring all the happy museum exhibits both old and new:

This is new! The museum has a new exhibit on the International Space Station, and it's awesome.

AND they have Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 on long-term loan! You know what a space nerd I am, and I'm especially super stoked about this guy because this is the craft that almost drowned Grissom in the ocean when the hatch blew off of it before the rescue helicopters had reached him. There was suspicion for a while that Grissom had blown the hatch himself in error, but he always denied it, and I *think* the controversy has since been resolved in his favor. If you can check out video footage of the rescue operation, however, I highly recommend that you do, because it's absolutely harrowing: you can see the helicopter hook the Liberty Bell 7 and attempt to lift it, but because it's full of water it's too heavy, and you can actually see it drag the helicopter down with it, until the helicopter has to let it go. At the edge of the screen, the entire time this is occurring, is Gus Grissom, actively drowning. He was rescued, the Liberty Bell 7 was lost, and it was only recovered from the ocean floor decades later.

The Liberty Bell 7 exhibit is located in the former planetarium, and they've used the screen to make a show centered on the craft.

David Wolf is the museum's Astronaut-in-Residence, and this is his logbook from one of his missions.

It's kind of weird.

This is the elevator to the Treasures of the Earth exhibit, and it's a ride and show all on its own. We've seen it a hundred times, but we still love it, especially Syd, who has a fangirl crush of her own on Josh, the docent who was filmed for this and is also one of the hosts of This Week's WOW.

Terra Cotta Warriors!

I want to use this same electrolytic process in small scale to remove the gunk from some of the treasures that we find with our metal detector.

Not treasures like this, of course, but still treasures!

The museum's Chihuly sculpture is its centerpiece.

Just so I can end on a sad note as well: now that our plans to be regular volunteers at the museum are firmed up, I've made the difficult decision to quit our weekly volunteer job at the food pantry. I'm going to miss it a lot, but to be fair, this new job is probably going to be much closer to following the children's passions than the food pantry was. The kids are hard workers, but it's clear that after several years of labor at the pantry that the work isn't necessarily inspiring to them. Of course being of service isn't about you, the servant, but about the good that you do, but there are so many ways to be of service in this world that you might as well do something that brings you joy, if you can. Working towards food stability is crucial, but working to increase our collective knowledge and to provide extraordinary learning opportunities to children and their families is also pretty great. 

And also, can I just say? Dinosaurs. We'll be working with dinosaurs. There are worse ways to spend two hours on a Friday, I can 100% absolutely guarantee.

Yet Another Day at the Children's Museum

I know that by now you must be bored of me posting about our visits to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis--oh, gee, another photo of the water clock! Hey, there they are goofing around in Dinosphere again!

Well, if you think that, then I fooled you, because I did NOT take a photo of the water clock this time! Instead, here we are goofing around in Dinosphere!

We were playing a game entitled Carry On a Casual Conversation While Gesturing with a T-Rex Tooth. It's a super fun game!

Our Leonardo, the Mummified Dinosaur is famous. Remember we even got asked about him after we played Stump the Docent at the Field Museum?

They're pretending to be T-rexes. I mean, obviously.

We have a lot of favorites in the permanent collection--here is where I *should* be showing you a photo of the water clock!--

Seriously, how many hundred times has this one compared her hand, ever growing, but still ever too small, to this polar bear print?

 --but we always check in with the traveling exhibits, too:

I have long complained about the museum's penchant for booking branded exhibits, but I have to admit that this Hot Wheels exhibit did include a lot of good information about how cars work.

We are doing our best Despotic Monarch faces in the Pirates and Princesses exhibit.

I think my face is really good!

 I think that everyone's favorite exhibit, however, is the Wonders of the World playground just outside the museum:

It's not a playground of THE Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, because that's just focused on the Mediterranean area, did you know? Leaves out loads of glorious stuff.

Like the Taj Mahal!

And the Great Wall of China!

Not even the Sphinx is on that list, because it hadn't been rediscovered at the time.

Part of the reason why we were there was to formalize our volunteer plans, so when July comes around, alas, you'll be seeing even more of the Children's Museum from us, as we devote a couple of Friday afternoons a month to cleaning and preparing fossils down in the Paleo Lab.

I have mentioned before that we're the coolest, right?!?