Lyda Hill Gems and Mineral Hall at the Perot Museum

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is a frequent science destination for us and the Lyda Hill Gem and Mineral Hall is one of our favorite exhibits within the museum. 

The hall has recently received some updates and while we were checking it out we had the wonderful opportunity to hear Ms. Lyda Hill speak to the guests.  That is, THE Lyda Hill of the Lyda Hill Gem and Mineral Hall!  Ms. Hill is one of Dallas' biggest philanthropists and she is passionate about promoting a love of science especially in young people.  She remembers how she loved to pick up pebbles when she was young and she wants to inspire others to pick up pebbles and explore the world of gems and minerals.  

You see, gems and minerals are a "gateway science".  Kids who might not have much appreciation for formal science will still be fascinated by interesting or sparkly rocks.  As they develop a love for gems and minerals, other doors of interest might open for them into related sciences like chemistry, geology, art, geometry, art, etc.

The Lyda Hill Gem and Mineral Hall has four signature displays.  Their 5 foot tall amethyst geode has always been an impressive site.  The Eyes of Africa is a show-stopping fluorite found in the "Alien Eye" pocket in Namibia, Africa.  It has symmetrical black outer zones framing diamond-shaped vibrant green cores.  This beautiful piece is on loan from Lyda Hill.

Stibnite, also known as Antimony Sulfide, is one of Nicholas' favorite displays.  It is a robust cluster of crystal formations recovered from an industrial ore mine in Jiangxi Province of China.  It is an amazing piece.

And finally, the monthly birthstone case displays the rough and faceted forms along with a special display of beautiful jewelry featuring the current month's gem.

We admired the Aurora Butterfly of Peace, a 240 colored diamonds, some of which fluoresce under UV light.  This piece symbolizes "a spiritual connection to Earth for all humankind".

I am in love with this Ammonite fossil that has an iridescent coating of Aragonite.  It was found in Canada.

As we were admiring this amazing piece of Tanzanite, Ms. Lyda Hill came over to speak to us!!   This is one of her pieces that she has loaned to the museum.

She talked to us some more about her passion for inspiring children and adults to learn more about nature so that they will take care of this planet for the next generation.  We enjoyed hearing her stories about a few of her other pieces on display at the museum.

There are sections in the hall based on color, based on the country where the specimens were found, and based on the type of gem and mineral.  It makes it really interesting to look at the pieces this way.
 

For example, these three pictures below all represent rhodochrosite but look how different they look from each other.  

There are also several interactive screens where you can see what different minerals are made of or play a head-to-head game to test you gem and mineral knowledge.

Here are a few of our other favorite specimens in the hall.  I like the rich purple and turquoise of the Azurite/Malachite piece.  The stringy slivers of silver are one of Nicholas' favorites.

We love being inspired to learn something new every time we visit the Perot Museum!

As we were leaving the museum, Rachel proudly pointed out that we actually spoke to one of the founding donors of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.  

Come check out the amazing new look of the Lyda Hill Gem and Mineral Hall but make plans to come back later in February for the museum's upcoming special exhibit, The Art of the Brick, featuring the world's largest display of LEGO art!  You can bet we will be back for that!

The Perot Museum of Nature and Science is located at 2201 N. Field Street in Dallas.  For more information, please visit their website at https://www.perotmuseum.org/.

VTech Innotab Max {review}

Rachel was delighted to learn the VTech had sent us an Innotab Max to review.  She has the original Innotab and she enjoys it.  However, the Innotab Max is so much more advanced and has some great new features.  

Let's start with the look of it.  The Innotab Max comes in blue or pink.  It has a 7 inch high resolution screen which presents the best graphics I've seen from a children's tablet.  There is also a dual-core CPU so the tablet runs significantly faster than her previous Innotab.  It has a strong plastic case with a cover that flip over and act as a stand.  It is sturdy and has already survived several accidental drops.  It has a stylus and a slot to hold it.  

What can a child do with the Innotab Max?  There are games and ebooks available for a wide range of children's ages and abilities, from ages 3-9.  Rachel is in first grade and there is a wide selection of games and books for her to learn with on this tablet.  Her favorite things to do is work with the Movie Maker app or play the Frozen game but she also loves listening to her music playlists.  The Innotab Max comes with an educational bundle plus one Toca Boca app of your choice.  But there is also a complete library of additional games and ebooks that can be downloaded to the device or game cartridges can be purchased as well.  There is a camera and Rachel loves taking selfies!  She can even use the Kid Connect app to send her pictures directly to me on my smart phone.  She can also use Kid Connect to send voice or text messages to me. 

The parent side of things.  There are parental controls that let me manage her apps, web access, and tablet time.  I can log on and view her progress to see what she is playing and how she is doing.  I let her bring the Innotab Max if I know we might be stuck in a doctor's waiting room for a while.  It has a headphone jack so she can be entertained without disturbing others around her.

The Innotab Max's MSRP is $99.99 which is great for such a high quality children's tablet that will grow with my child.  For more information, check out the VTech website.

VTech provided me with an Innotab Max for the purpose of this review.  However, all comments and opinions stated here are entirely my own.

What an Amazing VBS!

My kids always love going to VBS in the summer.  They have fun with friends, play games, have yummy snacks all while learning about and worship our great God.  

But this year, Nicholas is too old to go to VBS.  I was devastated when I went to register him and it said Kindergarten through 5th grade.  He is entering 6th grade this year.  But as I looked around the website a little more I realized that in 6th grade he can volunteer at VBS!  Woo hoo!  Not only would he still get to be there for all the fun but he would actually be a part of sharing that love with younger kids.  Amazing!

For the week before VBS actually started, Nicholas went to church every day for about 4 hours at a time to help them turn the whole inside of the church into a magical place of wonder for "The Great Voyage" theme this year.

He worked on turning a hall into the inside of Jonah's whale.  See the back bone and rib cage?

Another hall was a boat on the ocean.  I love the waves made of blue vinyl tablecloths and the tops cut off of white plastic drinking cups.  So creative!

And how can you save money on decorative life saving rings?  Buy white stryofoam rings and paint red stripes on them!

Nicholas also got to make and custom decorate lots of paper fish to swim in the ocean.  He had lots of themed ones....a school fish, Iron Man fish, Captain America fish, Hulk fish, Pokemon fish, popcorn fish, smiley face fish, etc.  He definitely had fun with this part.

The kids are divided up into groups and Nicholas would be one of two leaders for a group of kids.  There are several different animal characters in the program so the kids are first assigned an animal then they are subdivided by colors.  Nicholas had just said that he hoped that he didn't get put in the Zoe group and just minutes later I got an email from the church saying he was in charge of the Zoe Brown group.  I asked him why he didn't want to be in Zoe and he said because Zoe is a girl character and she is a very pink flamingo.  But he handled it well and even came up with some good responses if he had younger boys in his group who complained about being in the pink flamingo group.

Monday rolled around and he was excited to see how his first day as a VBS volunteer would go.

Rachel was attending as a participant and she just loved that the hallway into the main sanctuary was made to feel like you are in the ocean.  There was blue fabric and fish hanging from the ceiling, bubbles galore, and fun music playing!

Inside the sanctuary, the energy was bubbling over.  How exciting for these kids. God will do amazing things here this week!

Rachel was in Bo Orange group.  Her leaders gave them orange bandanas to wear and painted blue on their faces to look like Bo the shark.

When I picked her up, she asked for some coins to donate to the VBS mission outreach.  She was so excited to add her coins to the big jar on stage.

Rachel has been carrying around some post card invitations to VBS and she cut one of them up to make it into a puzzle.

Bubbles, bubbles, everyday!  How could you not be excited to walk through this many bubbles each morning!

The main lobby held a giant 15-20 foot ark for Noah with each of the animal characters aboard.  

Nicholas asked to go to Party City to get some spirit items for his team.  We found this awesome pink flamingo which I thought for sure he would refuse to hold because it is pink.  But I was wrong.  He wanted to be a good leader and get his team excited and that was more important than his dislike of the color pink so he got it.

He also got some brown bandanas for his team, some crosses that we made into necklaces, and some whistles for them.

I noticed that they had decorated the outside of the Jonah's whale hallway to show that you are going inside the whale's mouth.  So cute!

And inside the whale was complete and lit with a black light that gave it an awesome glow.

I just love our church's Children's Ministry and how to go above and beyond to reach the next generation.  It has been so much fun watching all these kids each day.  They are excited about the Lord, making Godly friendships, and having fun together the whole week!  Here is one of the songs that our church wrote for this VBS.  There are even some little dance moves that go with it.  It was amazing to be in the room watching 600 kids and 1200 volunteers singing and jumping to the music!  You can get a glimpse of the excitement from this video below:

Rachel and her leaders.  

Tomorrow night we all come back together for a big fun family night outside with bounce houses, water slide, a petting zoo, and more!  We can't wait!

Stamps Teach Plus

My kids are strangely in love with collecting and trading Pokemon cards.  I don't know how this started except that they've seen other kids trading these cards but the whole thing seems completely pointless to me. 

So I decided to try to introduce them to collecting stamps instead in hopes that they might actually learn a few things while collecting.  I found this wonderful resource called Stamps Teach Plus.  There are downloadable lesson plans and worksheets about stamp collecting but what is really amazing is that when I signed them up for the program, they received all of this wonderful stamp collecting material pictured below...for free!

There are First Day Covers which are envelopes that have a stamp that is cancelled on the first day of issue for that stamp.  It's a commemorative keepsake for the day the stamp was first released.

There are challenges called StampVentures that get the kids to look through stamps for specific objects and they cover school subjects of Math, Science, Social Studies, Fine Arts, and Language Arts.  

There are also small StampVentures posters for each subject.  The one below challenges kids to look for stamps that represent countries where their ancestors were born.  I hope the kids enjoy these challenges and learn a little along the way.

There are colorful stickers for some stamp themes.

They each received several stamp albums for their collections.

More stamp related educational material - word searches, cross word puzzles, etc.  Love it!

There is also some introductory info to stamp collecting as well as a membership application to the American Philatelic Society.  I'm signing them both up...and I might just join myself so I can learn more too!

Some stamps and historical information.

Lots more First Day Covers!

A few colorful posters covering different stamp themes.  The Reptiles and Amphibians poster is Rachel's favorite.

There are also some small educational posters that go along 

And what is most fun is the giant pile of cancelled stamps they received to start their collections off right.  How cool is that?!

What a wonderful resource for introducing kids to stamp collecting!

BB Gun Youth Night

Nicholas loves going to .22 Youth Night at our local gun range.  They close off a whole room of lanes just for kids to shoot .22 so it is quiet and fun for the kids.  

When Rachel turned 6, one of the first things she said she wanted to do was go to BB Gun Youth Night.  She had been wanting to go at other times but their minimum age for Youth Night is 6 years old.  

She has gone to almost every BB Gun Youth Night since she turned 6.  She rents a pink BB Gun, of course!

Stuart has done a great job of teaching both of our kids about gun safety as well as how to handle a gun.  They take it very seriously.

Rachel is pretty good at it too!  The pink dots on the black target are hers.

Books on CD

We were at the library the other day and we stumbled upon the Books on CD section. Nicholas was excited to see a couple of CDs by Gary Paulsen. He is one of Nicholas' favorite authors.

Books on CD are a great way to spend some time while driving around in the car or listening to while building with LEGOS during quiet time. I'm surprised I never thought to seek these out for Nicholas before but I'm glad we've discovered them.