Chattanooga Children's Museum

I've said it before, but (wow!) the Chattanooga Children's Museum is a great place to visit!   My girls love it.  We were so impressed that we bought annual passes about two years ago even though we live over an hour away.  We went about every six weeks for a year.  Then we decided to take a year break from membership.  I was, of course, thrilled when Catherine's on line school offered a free day at the Museum!  We drove up there and had a fabulous time! (warning: this is a LONG post)

Because we had not been there in a year, there were lots of new things that I had never seen before, like using colored straws to make sculpture:

 The clay section was still there and still a hit with the kids:

 They have added some computers for "digital coloring:"

 Catherine loved the rolling stamping:

 And the costumes were a hit:

 As was the play stage:

 Sabrina playing on an enormous xylophone:

 A magnetic board of dinosaurs and their fossils:

 Sabrina digging for dinosaur bones (well, scooping sand into an upturned hat):

 Catherine dressed up as a dinosaur and trying to look intimidating as she roars:

 Sabrina playing with a wooden scene of dinosaurs and trees:

 Catherine exploring a microscope:

One new exhibit which the children loved was a huge track (20 feet long) full of hills and loops to roll balls down:

A geoboard with gazillion pegs and colored rubber bands:

 A new exhibit was clothespins, blankets, and PVC pipe to make tents & tunnels:

The second floor of the museum houses temporary exhibits.  The current exhibit is all about China.  Here is Catherine painting Chinese characters on a wall with water:

A brand new section in the museum is on bees, honey, pollination, etc.  Sabrina dressed up as a beekeeper:

 Outdoors Catherine played gigantic chess:

 Huge bubbles:

I am always amused how Catherine, who has refused to eat from birth, still loves to play in pretend kitchens.  The museum has several pretend kitchens, including this one in the ship:

 Sabrina building dams:

 Petting a live snake:

 The medical section has added some wheelchairs for the dolls:

 Sabrina playing in the big pretend kitchen:

Back to the China exhibit (the pictures are a bit out of order because the girls roamed from room to room and back again) the girls built a miniature Great Wall of China:

 Playing on the computer in the China section:

Another pretend kitchen - this one with a toy rice steamer, small woks, and lots of Chinese plastic food:

 The girls pretending to be Chinese schoolgirls, watching a video on how to use an abacus:

 Here's a close-up of the abacus, although none of us understood how they used it to do their math:

I loved this part; my girls pretending they were working in a rice patty - planting, picking and bundling pretend rice plants:

 Back to the bee section, Sabrina put on a drone costume and climbed into the hive:

Catherine laid down on the ground and looked out the window at a live bee hive.  She loved this and literally laid there for 20 minutes before I made her leave.

 Another new part of the science section was the pressurized air tubes, which Sabrina loved:

 This car can be virtually "driven" across country:

I cannot stress enough how awesome this museum is.  If you have never been, try it!