Out Of Town Education

I wanted to write a post about our vacation.
There was not a whole lot of time to sit down and do learning activities but my sister and I still did our best to educate our kids in all the fun things we did on vacation.

Water Play!

While me and mommy #2 were getting ready to go shopping we needed something to busy the kids. 

My sister pulls out this tub of our younger brothers old rubber duck collection and set the kids at a table. 

They were enjoying themselves just fine until they wanted each others ducks. >:/

To solve this problem I figured we could give them each their own container to play with and why not add water? 

It worked! 

They enjoyed having their own space to play.  They older two still played pretend together and traded ducks with good manners.  This idea was mostly to help the younger kids. 

Dinosaur Park

At such a fun age all of the kids love dinosaurs and were stoked to go to the dinosaur park.  We saved this trip for last giving them something to look forward to during the vacation. 

My soon to be husband (hehe it is lovely saying that) loves to learn new things.  While going through the park there are plaques with information on the dinosaur you see.  He read the information out loud of every single plaque!  There were 52 of them not counting the one's in the museum. 

This may sound boring to you but it was very interesting! I learned a lot and so did the kids. 

But of course, it was not all about listening to facts....

We teased the kids by telling them we would feed them to the dinosaurs.  We were not expecting such great photo opportunities! 

Onsite in the museum there were paleontologists working on actual dinosaur bones recently discovered.
There was a window the kids could go up to and ask the paleontologists questions. Which was perfect!  

We learned from them that there is evidence that some dinosaurs had feathers!  We were also allowed to touch a recently found fossil of real dinosaur skin.  It was super cool!

 Here the kids are comparing their hands to the foot prints of dinosaurs. 
I do not recall which dinosaurs.

One of the great things about the park was how realistic the models were.  They had a couple animatronics but I am guessing it would be quiet expensive to have 52 of them to model all the different dinosaur types.

This picture is neat because you can see the mountains behind the dinosaur.  It looks neat. 

Living Planet Aquarium

 This was the first trip on our vacation.  It took about and hour to walk through and look at all the cool things they had.
Which included:
Sharks

Sting rays you could touch






Glowing neon jelly fish















A bunch of tropical fish tanks

and plenty of space the kids could play.  Like a life size ship wreck.  Caves and tunnels that had mini aquariums in them.  Row boats and figurines to climb on. 

During down time the kids played with file folders and colored in ABC & 123 lesson books I found at Wal-Mart before our trip for $2.  I really like them and they were great for traveling too!  My favorite thing was that there were things for both my son (2) and daughter (4) in each coloring book.  

I am looking for time to write a post about the traveling activities we packed for the kids.  

We had a 26 hour car ride (each way-total of 52 hours not counting stops) with two children.  We must have picked the right activities because we made it with no fits, crying, tantrums, nothing!  It was a nice smooth ride.  

I really want to share my ideas with you!