Science Sunday: Really exploring and observing

A common site in many science or nature museums is the curio cabinet.  It’s filled with odds and ends of all sorts.  Kids tend to glance at these and run past to find something big and impressive or interactive.

But, there’s a lot to be learned from these cabinets.  Things I figured out to try last time we passed one:

1.  Play I Spy.

2.  Challenge them to find things of a certain type.

3.  Play 20 questions.

4.  Take turns observing things, but you can’t see something someone else has described.  Challenge your kids to say more and more about what they’re seeing.

5.  Create groups of things to describe, for example different types of eggs, rocks or fossils.

Oh, and these are unrelated to the curio cabinet, but were in the same exhibit of awesomeness.

They also had a replica of a mammoth dig site that you could walk on top of and look down on through plexi-glass.  It was pretty cool.