Week 2 - the Natural History Museum

Day two of homeschooling was supposed to be about dinosaurs, so we decided to head straight for the Natural History Museum once we'd dropped Vaughan off at school.  Both the kids love the Natural History Museum, but it's huge and crowded and I usually find it a bit stressful.

For the first time, we decided to get a free Explorer's Backpack from the information desk.  You can get them on several topics, but dinosaurs wasn't one of them.  So we chose the one on Monsters, which is concentrated on the main hall, with the fantastic replica Diplodocus skeleton.  We did a few of the clues, but mainly Emily liked the hard explorer hat and the binoculars, even though everything seen through them was hopelessly blurred!

Then we went through the dinosaur rooms.  Of course the highlight is the life-size animatronic T-Rex, but we also had fun on the lower level, sketching a dinosaur nest and learning about the different kinds of plant life in the three periods that dinosaurs lived in: the Triassic, the Jurassic and the Cretaceous.

Then we did a bit of revision on mammals, mainly because I can't resist the big room with the lifesize blue whale!

We couldn't escape without visiting the shop, where we bought a new book (one I nearly bought a couple of months ago at the zoo), How Big Was A Dinosaur by Anna Milbourne & Serena Riglietti, which is mainly great because of the giant poster in an envelope at the back!  We also bought a crystal growing kit and a couple of postcards.