The Summer Learning Institute took a break during this week, so not a whole lot was going on. I really just helped around with some small tasks. I lent a hand in re-stocking the pizza area by adding new toppings and folding delivery boxes. When walking around the children’s wing with a couple really cool employees, they pointed out one of the fabric pizza doughs stuck in the ceiling. This made me laugh too hard because I realized how talented kids are at throwing stuff all over the place.  

I had done this specific task a few times before, but I also helped staple, hole-punch, and alphabetize students’ release forms into two binders. One is for the Education staff to keep, and the other has copies that the front security desk holds on to. These babies were packed!! I could barely close them. 

Great news is the 10- to 13-year-olds had their new teacher come in! She had previously taught at the summer camp last year and came in with her mom this week to collect as many materials from the crafts closet as possible to prep her curriculum. I searched around with them for as many items as possible by looking at her printed lists of what she needed. She and her mom were super nice and very well organized. 

Unfortunately, she couldn’t find everything listed, because the other teachers had practically cleared the closet. What she did find she stored inside bins and placed them up high with a bunch of notes claiming her territory.

The second week of summer camp was space themed!! Since the 10- to 13-year-olds were still out of a teacher, my supervisors in education plus planetarium staff were in charge of them. This week was very cool, I enjoyed learning some amazing astronomy facts and watching shows in the Lohman Planetarium with the kids. I highly recommend this one incredible show that we watched, From Earth to the Universe. It’s a high-quality animated visualization of how our solar system was formed starting from as far back as theories go. It was super fascinating to see and really put into perspective how coincidental our world’s existence is. 

The kids did a lot of fun activities: they got to see a dry ice demonstration, paint hand prints onto a paper moon, set off decorated rockets in the museum auditorium through hoops, and represent the solar system outside with inflatable planets by spinning around each other (yes, it was as cute as it sounds.) 

Here’s photos in order of all the activities (save for the kids rotating around each other because photos of them are prohibited, but I put picture of a felt solar system to compensate) –

I also stayed with the 10- 13-year-olds for the fourth week of camp, which was about engineering. They worked together to build a pulley by following an instruction manual and did a pretty dang good job at it!! 

They also used popsicle sticks to design buildings – 

Lastly, an older gentleman who actually is a retired engineer that developed a lot of the interactive features in the museum’s kid’s wing came in to talk about his work as a guest speaker. He answered questions and gave a lot of interesting insight into his profession!