Find you artistic inspiration.
Do you like to create art? Do you like to paint, draw, play with clay? Austin Children’s Museum’s MakerKids campers headed to The Blanton last week to see the amazing artwork they have on display.
Watch the video to find out where Gallery Educator, Samm, finds her artistic inspiration. She also shares a bit of two of her favorite books! The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds and Art by Patrick McDonald.
Comic books, also known as graphic novels, are stories told with words and pictures. You can create and star in your very own comic strip.
First, think of a story. Think of your characters, where your story will take place, the begining, middle, and the end.
Next, create a storyboard for your comic. Draw a quick sketch of the different scenes in your comic and what you want the final product to look like.
You can use household items as your props and backdrop or you can create a backdrop by drawing your scene on large butcher paper. Once you have created your backdrop you can tape it to the wall.
Now, pretend you an actor. Act out important scenes from your comic and have a parent take pictures. Once you print out your pictures, you are ready to complete your comic strip.
Cut out your pictures and arrange them on your piece of paper. Decorate your comic strip, add any text your comic might need, and tape your pictures to paper. You have just finished your comic strip. Great job!
Click below to see more comic strips from our MakerKids campers.
Nature is a very big part of Austin life. We have the Greenbelt, lots of hiking trails, and a lake in the middle of downtown. If you love all things nature and science, you should get to know Enzo. Austin kid scientist, Enzo, is an eight year old who knows a lot about nature and science. Click here to check out his website and to learn more about his ENZOology adventures.
Austin Children’s Museum’s Science-Palooza campers enjoyed the Austin outdoors, when they vistied the Austin Nature and Science Center. It is located on the western edge of Zilker Park and is filled with the wildlife, plants, and geology of Central Texas. The Austin Nature and Science Center is home to many animals including: owls, a red-tailed hawk, and a coyote. They even have a dino pit, where you can practice your Paleontology skills.
Austin Children’s Museum’s Engineer It! campers created Balloon Brains yesterday. Our brains are protected by our very sturdy skulls. The campers’ challenge was to make a hard shell to protect their balloons, just the way our skulls protect our brains!
Materials:
· Water Balloons
· Soft and protective materials (cotton, fabric, egg cartons, bubble wrap, plastic)
· Tape
Instructions:
Cover your balloon with your protective materials. You can use anything you like, but be sure you can still see part of you balloon. Don’t cover it completely.
Next, test your design! Start by tossing your Balloon Brain softly, then add a little more force each time.
Watch our Engineer It! campers test their designs:
Last week, UT’s Patty Estep introduced our Girls Explore Science campers to the exciting world of chemistry! In this experiment, hot water is poured into a tub containing very cold liquid nitrogen. When they mix together they create a giant cloud of water vapor. A similar reaction can be found in our environment. For example, when hot and cold air mix, it can form severe weather like tornadoes! Watch the reaction between hot water and liquid nitrogen:
Nitrogen is the most abundant element in Earth’s atmosphere. We breathe nitrogen in it’s gaseous state everyday. The air we breathe is 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases. Nitrogen can also be in a liquid state. Liquid nitrogen is very cold and dangerous to touch with your bare hands. To make liquid nitrogen, air is cooled and compressed. It takes 80 liters of air to make one liter of liquid nitrogen.
Today our Eco-Explorer campers visited The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems. The CMPBS specializes in life cycle planning and design. They use recycled materials in every part of their buildings. For example, the walls at CMPBS are made of straw and plaster! The insulation in the walls and ceilings of most of our homes is made of fiber glass, while the insulation at CMPBS is made of recycled blue jeans. That is a very inventive way to keep the inside air cool in the summer and warm in the winter. They have a table made from an old door and look at these lamp shades made out of cheese graters:
They also used recycled metal to make this cool bird sculpture.
Can you think of some items that could be recycled and used for a different purpose?
To learn more about The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, click here.
Today our Science-Palooza campers learned about polymers while making gooey slime. The main ingredient of our slime, Elmer’s glue, is a polymer. A polymer consists of a long chain of molecules. We added Borax to the mix and the molecules in the glue linked together to form stretchy slime!
Take a look at our previous post for instructions on how to make your own slimy concoction at home!
http://blog.austinkids.org/2008/07/29/how-to-make-glue-slime/
In Eco Explorers camp we learned there are plenty of ways for one person to make a difference for the planet. A very simple way to save energy and help decrease global climate change is to turn off the lights! During Earth Hour this year at 8:30pm on March 28th join millions of people who are turning off their lights.
See what kids in Australia have to say about Earth Hour:
This Saturday evening my lights are getting turned off!
Here’s a fun project we did at Day Camp that you can try at home!
Objective: Use sweet materials to build a structure with strength!
Materials Needed: gumdrops, toothpicks
What’s the big deal about triangles?
As you’ve probably already discovered, squares collapse easily under compression. Four toothpicks joined in a square tend to collapse by giving way at their joints, their weakest points.
But if you make a toothpick triangle, the situation changes. The only way to change the angles of the triangle is by shortening one of the sides. So to make the triangle collapse you would have to push hard enough to break one of the toothpicks.
If you want to, you can use your gumdrops and toothpicks to build some strong structures that are made by combining triangles and squares. Looking for other triangles in structures around you may give you ideas for other designs you can build with gumdrops and toothpicks.
What other shapes can you make that will withstand applied force?
Our “Maker Kids” C-day camp yesterday was a blast! Literally. At Ladybird Lake Miss Audrey showed us what happens when you drop a package of Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. She was a Maker of messes for that portion of the camp!
In the afternoon we all collaborated to design and make a mini model of a city out of recycled boxes, toys, games, and plastic. Look closely and you’ll see an aquarium, hotels, a lighthouse (with a working light!), a factory, an airport, and a children’s museum (with a slide!).
At Maker Faire, ACM will host an activity station where we’ll make a Mega Model. Join us! And for more on our upcoming C-Day camps (held on AISD student holidays), check out our website.
We’re standing on the dive platform, flippers on and air tanks strapped firmly to our backs. One by one we step off the edge and plunge deep into the cool, blue water below. After the fizzing bubbles have cleared we see stretched out below us an island of colorful corals and seaweeds bathed in beautiful blue light. Neon-bright fish dart playfully over the reef as we begin our slow descent to explore the deep sea below…
It was definitely an undersea adventure here at camp this week! We learned all about the ocean and the amazing creatures it contains. From penguins to sharks to coral, the ocean supports a variety of different life forms on our planet. Today we explored fish and learned all about their anatomy and the habitats they live in. We examined a real fish and noticed that this animal has eyes on both sides of its head, allowing it to see all the way around itself (a handy adaptation when you’re constantly on the lookout for predators!)
We made fish imprints and learned that the primary purpose of scales is to give the fish external protection, like a flexible, little suit of body armor. Then we went out and observed the fish swimming in the museum’s aquarium, we noted differences in how each fish moved and behaved as well as their colors and size.
Do you, or have you ever had a fish? What kind was it? Tell us what it looked like and how it behaved.
We’re floating weightlessly in a vast sea of stars, looking back at the earth suspended in the absolute black, infinite void of space. Only the sound of our own breathing from within our helmets pierces the quiet galaxy air. We begin to make our way back to the shuttle as we continue our journey navigating the endless depths of the universe.
… Just another day at Outer Space Camp here at Austin Children’s Museum. When we weren’t off exploring the planets and stars in our rocket ship, we were doing all kinds of other fun activities and learning lots of interesting facts about our universe. Today we painted pictures of earth using pie plates. Did you know that about 70% of the earth’s surface is covered in water? We may need some more blue paint guys!
We drew pictures of a nighttime scene to illustrate what we know about the sky. Some of us drew owls gliding silently through the night air and bats flitting across the moonlit sky. Others of us dotted ours with shooting stars and constellations. Can you see the big dipper tonight?
What other things do you see when you look at the night sky? Share your observations with us!
It was Cooking & Baking Camp here at ACM this week where we whipped up some tasty recipes and visited some of Austin’s finest kitchens & restaurants! Today, we got a taste of Italy when we visited the Young Chefs Academy, where we honed our culinary skills by making cheesey bread!
Not only did we get to enjoy our tasty creations, but more importantly we learned some of the fundamentals of cooking & how we can help out around the kitchen! Our chefs taught us proper kneading technique & how to correctly measure flour. We cut up rosemary, basil & oregano to top off our cheesy concoctions for just the right flavor. Then it was into the oven to transform our recipe into something warm and delicious!
While we waited, we learned some interesting facts about pizza, like did you know that Americans eat 350 slices every second? That’s 100 acres of pizza per day!
Then we explored the science of bread by creating a yeast-air balloon, by simply mixing sugar, water & yeast in a plastic bottle and covering it with a balloon. We observed as the yeast metabolized the sugar producing carbon dioxide and thus inflating our balloon. (Head on over to PBSKids to test it yourself.)
Once we knew the science behind our food, it was time to dig in and reap the benefits of all our hard work. YUM!
What are some of YOUR favorite toppings to eat on your pizza?
This week we went on another excavation adventure in dinosaur camp! We were a team of top-notch paleontoloists unearthing the fossils of all sorts of ancient creatures. We used brushes to carefully brush away sand so as not to damage the bones and recorded information about our findings in our fossil journals. 
Today we unearthed Deinonychus, a speedy predator with 5-inch long, knife-like claws on each foot! We learned that Deinonychus used these retractable hook claws for hunting and seriously wounding their prey, making this dino somebody you wouldn’t want to run into at meal time!
Later, we made our own fossilized dinosaur tracks with clay and learned that when paleontologists find these kind of fossilized imprints it helps them to figure out how big dinos were, whether they lived alone or in packs and even how fast they could run! We also drew a dinosaur habitat mural and filled it with all our favorite dinos and things they might like to eat. What kinds of things would you eat if you were a dinosaur? Would you be a plant-eater like Triceratops? Or a meat-eater like Deinonychus?
In camp this week, we traveled back in time to the land of dinosaurs to explore the lives of these ancient reptiles. We learned about the work of paleontologists and examined replica dinosaur claws. We used our imaginations to visualize the size of these creatures and how they might have moved.
The folks over at Discovery’s Dinosaur Planet have done some really neat work actually bringing our prehistoric friends to life! Animators show how dinosaurs of Mongolia and Patagonia might have looked and moved 80 million years ago. Head on over to their video gallery to see for yourself!
For a more interactive experience check out the DinoViewer to explore the size of these magnificent creatures. Learn facts and play around with 3D rotating models of each dinosaur to really get a feel for how they looked.
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