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!