Another Great Trip to the Grand Rapids Public Museum

We went to the Big, Big Bugs exhibit at the Grand Rapids Public Museum yesterday.  It was great!  We always have such a wonderful time at the kid-friendly changing exhibits.  The activities are JUST RIGHT for a group of kids like mine.  There are entertaining, educational activities to keep everyone busy for just about an hour, and then we're done.

There was a little "cave" that the kids could crawl into, and then pop their heads out quite close to the animatronic, dueling beetles.  As you can see, the small, medium, and large (relatively speaking) Mears kids all thought that was pretty entertaining.

Here's Henry, taking a look at a very gigantic caterpillar.  Grandpa came along on our outing, and it was SO NICE that Grandpa could just tag along behind Henry as he wandered from spot to spot in the exhibit, looking at things in a scattered, very toddler-ish way.  It was pretty crowded in there, and it would have been too hard for me to keep track of all three kids without spoiling Henry's fun.

There was a table in the exhibit where the kids could sift through a tub of otameal and scoop out mealworms, their pupae, and the beetles they turn into ... and then put them under those green discs, which are enclosed, elevated magnifying glasses.  They could watch the critters wriggling and crawling around, nibbling at the oatmeal.  Pretty nifty!

Here are all three kids in one shot!  The boys are building their own bugs from some building toys that were sort of like Struxx, Legos, and Tinker Toys all mooshed together.  Lily is reading about the tropical stick bug.

Check out the spider web that was set up for kids to climb.  Yes, we (and they) know that spiders aren't bugs.  That was plainly explained.  But spiders are natural predators of many bugs, and lots of bugs get caught in spider webs.  Plus, little kids love to climb this thing.  So who cares if there was a spider section in a bug exhibit??

As always, there were a zillion little sit-down activities that fit with the theme of the exhibit.  This game was a lot like the board game Carcasonne, but with ants.  There were also places to make crayon rubbings of a huge variety of different bugs, animatronic heads of several different bugs that illustrated the different ways that bugs use their mouths to get food (those were a little creepy, if I'm being honest), cages full of live crickets at various stages of their lives, lots of butterfly and moth collections, bug-themed computer games... just a ton to see!