Tellus Museum

We recently went to the Tellus Museum in Cartersville on a GCA field trip.  It was great!    We went with another family we know from church, so we had a bunch of kids:

 The girls loved digging for pretend fossils in pretend dirt:

The number one activity was water play!  The museum calls it "gold panning" but my girls called it playing with sand and water in trays:

They had a plane similar to the Wright Brothers' plane (we just read a book about this, so the girls were thrilled!):

Another thrilling exhibit was a glass/light exhibit.  I have no idea what this exhibit was trying to teach, but I do know the girls squealed with delight and spent a good thirty minutes doing it.  As Catherine turned the knob, she could either see a reflection of herself or her sister sitting on the other side of the glass.

 I am not sure why this was hysterical.  Maybe it was an updated version of "Peekaboo."

 Of course they made lots of silly faces as they appeared and disappeared every few minutes:

 They loved playing in a carpet designed like the rings of a tree:

This circular room had pretend thunderstorms.  As pretend lightning was in the ceiling, Catherine laid down on the ground like you are supposed to do during a thunder storm.

We also saw a very unusual planetarium show called "Thrill Ride" or something like that.  The show was really a computer generated movie of amusement park rides on planets and moons.  It made Robby and I a little queasy, but the girls (and most of the children in the theater) screamed out the whole time on the "exciting" rides.  The movie included most planets, but not all of them.  On each planet they had things like mock roller coaster rides on Mercury.  Or a spinning ride on Saturn's rings.

Several months ago, Catherine and I made a list of where she wanted to go on a field trip.  One of her ideas was "the planet Mars."  This was not simply an idea for her; she was adamant about this field trip.  I tried to explain to her that we could not go to Mars because it was too far.  She suggested we get a rocket ship.  I told her that people cannot simply buy rocket ships and that she could go on a field trip to Mars when she grew up.  This seemed to silence her and we have not discussed it since.

On the way home from Tellus, she told us "my dream has finally come true!"  I asked what she meant and she said "we went on a field trip to Mars!"

A few weeks after the trip, Catherine told me "it is so sad to me that we didn't get to visit Uranus.  I want to go to all of the planets."  I am continuously shocked at how real things can seem to the girls, as well as how much she remembers things. 

We had a great time at Tellus!