LV trip: Leid Discovery Museum

Today I took Joe and Rychen to the children's museum. We have good memories there because we would always go there for school field trips growing up. So now its fun to take my kids, especially since we are homeschooling, and talk about science and everything.

Joe playing a harp with no strings

Hurricane simulator...it's loud and windy in there!!

Okay this next thing is Rychen's favorite. This is so cute. It's an air pressure contraption where you pull a cord to raise a bowling ball, then let it drop. The air pressure rushes through tubes and into the next chamber where a tennis ball awaits, and when the air hits it, the tennis ball shoots way up to the ceiling. The higher the bowling ball starts, the higher up the tennis ball goes. So naturally, if you are a six year old boy, you will want to pull that cord the very hardest you are capable of! Well Rychen has no inhibitions, he pulled it all the way to the floor. Here he is laying down, putting all his weight onto this cord before dropping the bowling ball!

This is the tennis ball shooting up to the rafters in the ceiling... its hard to see but there is a streak of lime green in the original photo.

This is the Einstein Corner which is my absolute favorite part. We watched 2 full science demonstrations and I just thought it was awesome!! I am a total nerd, but I get such fulfillment from teaching all this stuff to my kids! The first one was about chemistry. She taught us about states of matter (which we've covered at home) and then Physical Reaction vs. Chemical Reaction, the periodic table of elements, and then did some experiments to demonstrate. I had no idea you could blow up a balloon with hydrogen and then make it burst into flames. That was totally awesome! (but it scared Rychen P and he asked if it would happen again and I said No, but then she did it a second time and he gave me this death look like "Mom, You are a LIAR!") You can also put a styrofoam cup into acetone and it will totally melt away into this weird goo...but apparently that is only a physical reaction because it's still styrofoam and it can be built back into a cup, with the proper machinery.

A third thing is, you can combine hydrogen peroxide with yeast to get a huge mass of bubbles. The bag fills with air and in order to tell which gas is in the air (without doing the equation which is what we did in my boring school) is by putting a flame into the gas and testing the reaction to the flame. We already found out that hydrogen makes it explode, so I wondered what it was. I knew hydrogen and oxygen were the only gas elements in the original equation so I wasn't surprised when the answer was oxygen, which we knew because it fed the flame and the fire grew.

The second science "class" was about vision and optical illusions. This was really cool also, and it was fun to go through all these illusions with Rychen P and have him explain what he saw in it. It's so funny how our eyes get confused and miscommunicate with our brains. One crazy thing I learned was that we can confuse our motion sensors and see colors that are not there! I learned lots of stuff I have never heard before. So I really don't know why its called a Children's Museum :)