A trip out - Centre for Life

We had an impromptu day trip today, which turned out to be great fun. We had a FaceTime call with my sister this morning and Harry very proudly showed her his cress seeds from Beavers which are now growing small roots. We then dropped Stuart off at the train station as he had to travel to Sheffield for work today. In the station car park the boys spotted the Centre for Life and begged me to go. We had arranged to meet our friends from French in the park today, but the weather had already cancelled that, so we needed an alternative and I agreed.

Harry and Peter love the Centre for Life at the moment. We have been three times in the last month and it was really quiet, with just a few families and a couple of school groups. We also had luck to meet another home educating family with similar age children, so we stayed with them for most of the day - we didn't get home until 3.30pm!

They dusted sand from bones while we talked about what you can learn from them.

They made magnet machine designs.

Peter played for a long time with the sound tables.

We went to the science theatre show, where one of the staff showed us a variety of weather themed science on stage - cloud in a bottle, lightening, a rainbow and how cold air sinking creates fog. Harry really enjoyed it and I was so pleased that Peter sat through the whole thing with hardly any wriggling - it is advised for age 7 onwards but it was perfectly suitable for Harry and Peter obviously found it interesting too. The Centre for Life admission price includes the science theatre show and also three different planetarium shows, although Harry didn't want to watch any of those today. There is a new exhibition on DNA opening soon which might be interesting for Harry too, as we haven't looked at this before. 

In the under-7s area, the boys had a great play with the soft play blocks as it was so quiet, making some nice houses.

We were all a bit weary when we got home! Peter watched Alphablocks on TV and Harry played with his electronic science kit again, making a daybreak alarm, which sounded when the light came on in a dark room. He also started reading Mountain Rescue, an Oxford Reading Tree book at bedtime.