A Desk Free Classroom

I remember being so excited about field trips as a kid.  The zoo or the science museum or to the fire station.  Now I watch the teachers and parent volunteers try to guide 15 kids through something like that in a few hours and I just feel exhausted.  The kids don't get to linger on the things that interest them most and the teachers and parents look around wild eyed to make sure they haven't lost a member of their crew.

Yet there they are, trying to squeeze in any measure of hands on learning they can.  We know that experiential learning is such a valuable thing to have in the arsenal of teaching tools but one of the hardest things to inject into a classroom.

I don't think we'll have that issue at home.  I found online that the Miller Outdoor Theater in Houston was having free children's shows all week.  Today there was a showing of Mulan and I hauled the kids downtown to see it.  My son complained that he wanted to go to the Dinosaur Museum instead (Houston Museum of Natural Science) but I convinced him to stick it out and he had a good enough time that he wanted to thank Mulan afterwards. 

The show begins!

Thanks Mulan!

After the show, we walked across the street to the Science museum to see the most amazing collection of fossils I have ever seen.  They also have this beautiful permanent exhibit of Ancient Egyptian artifacts, including lots of painted coffins, several sarcophagus displays, and 3 real mummies.  This exhibit worked out really nicely with our Magic Tree House Book #4 last week where the children traveled to a pyramid and our follow up nonfiction books including Mummies, Pharoahs, and Pyramids (in our goodreads reviews).  He remembered more things than I thought he would and he had a great time "deciphering" the hieroglyphs on the walls, observing the canopic jars, and getting up close to the mummies.  I was pleased he noticed the scarab beetle as a reoccuring theme and we began pointing them out each time we saw one.  We decided that the beetle must be an important symbol in their culture and we'll look it up when we get a chance.

Outside the museum, a volunteer from the butterfly exhibit was outside with a large iguana.  We touched him and watched him eat apple slices.

Iguana

And it isn't as though these are isolated events.  Over the weekend, my husband took him to the Children's Museum of Houston and as a family, we had a really lovely visit to the Houston Arboretum on Sunday.  We are so lucky to live in a city with so much to experience and the ability to make it happen.  You can practical see the wheels turning in his head piecing things from books, idle conversation, and playtime all together.  

Of course we can't make every week as eventful as this one but we certainly have the freedom to do a lot more than a classroom model.