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SOEST Field Trip

We went on another absolutely fabulous field trip last weekend.


We went with our homeschool group to the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology open house. Talk about your hands on experiments! This is a homeschoolers dream come true! There were probably a hundred displays and experiments for the kids to participate in. I'm only going to show a few of them here, but there were many, many more!

There was a maze to determine which microbe we each most closely resembled.
There were experiments with sea water.

There were 3-D displays of the surface of other planets.

There was even an area to try your hand at tossing a rope onto a target as if you were a scientist on a ship. This went really well..........


........until Emily accidentally threw the rope directly at me.



One of the coolest experiments took place outside. The scientist placed liquid nitrogen in a container and put it in a garbage can of water. The resulting explosion was quite a crowd pleaser and they repeated it every twenty minutes. We heard the boom all day long, no matter where we were!




My personal favorite was a much smaller event. This man was sitting at a table talking to kids about dry ice. He would put some dry ice in a plastic tube and crimp the tube shut at the top and submerge it in a cup of warm water. He talked to the kids the entire time about how the dry ice doesn't melt, it normally turns into vapor (which is why it's dry ice). He would tell them if they watched closely though, they could see it turn into a liquid when he put it in a tube under water. The kids would all move in close to see the dry ice start to liquefy and then BAM! The dry ice would cause a mini-explosion and the water in the cup would shoot straight up and hit the ceiling. The kids jumped sky high and the man would laugh and laugh. Sometimes he would have to wipe his eyes he would laugh so hard.


I enjoyed this one so much, I stayed around to watch it four times.


There is nothing like watching a group of kids get monumentally startled for a good belly laugh.
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