Last week, my grade went to the museum of natural sciences to learn about plants, animals, and social terms such as race. Here’s how it went:

Since the school was ~40 minutes from the museum, we had to take a kind of long bus ride, but it was all worth it to go into the museum because we were almost immediately greeted with a gigantic sculpture of a dinosaur. We were split into groups by advisory, and then paired up with another advisory, so the entire grade was split up into 4 groups: 2 groups going into the museum and investigating animal exhibits, and 2 groups going into the museum and looking at statues. Luckily for me, my group was one of the 2 groups that went to look at the animals, and it was pretty fun! We started out looking at a huge exhibit showing all rare stones found in North Carolina. Next, we went to another huge exhibit with fake forest animals in their habitat.  We also got to see live amphibians, fish, and a huge turtle. After that, we went across a huge bridge to another building of the museum to a see a few exhibits about the earth, planets, and weather. We also got to view a really cool exhibit about technology and 3-D printing, which had really cool objects, structures, almost fidget toys, and a cool set of kinetic drums with buttons that made drum noises that ran of of the kinetic energy from your hand. Finally, we head back down and outside of the museum for lunch.

After lunch and we went up a few levels via escalators to view an exhibit about bugs and we saw spiders, beetles, and -my favorite of the exhibit- Ghost Shrimp! Next, we viewed an important exhibit about race. The exhibit explained how race was a made-up term and it’s really just the amount of melanin in a person’s skin. Personally, I really liked the exhibit, but I wish it was in the lobby, or a more popular area that behind the cafe on the top floor, because it covers  such an important topic. After that, we went back to the 1st level to look at the dinosaur sculpture and an ocean exhibit with a combination of actual animals and sculptures. Finally, we circled back to the lobby to view some more animal sculptures.

After that, we went back on the bus back to our school. I really liked the museum and thought that the exhibits were really cool and informative.