Adventures at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden

I am a bit behind on my posts. 🙂 I am currently trying to figure out how to have time to homeschool, clean the house, fix dinner and blog. I will post, but they just might be a little backdated.

We had a wonderful time exploring hands on activities at the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden on August 31st. The garden offers awesome daily hands on activities available for the kids at the Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden! We will plan on visiting again very soon, especially when it isn’t 100 degrees out. We chose to only visit a few of the galleries and will visit different ones on each trip.

We started out in the Exploration Center and Plaza.

There are several displays that are also hands on. Madison enjoyed looking at the plants, feeling the textures of different types of dirt and using a mobile camera to see the bugs up close!

She also learned about pollination at an instructor led biology lab activity.

The Exploration Center and Plaza has so much more! These were the activities we chose for the day, but it also includes:

Interactive technology and special programs inside the Exploration Center, including teacher-led chemistry and biology labs. This innovative indoor space features a plant lab, smart tables, soil specimen workstations, CSI-style mysteries, and the signature OmniGlobe.

Located in the Globe Theatre, the five-foot-tall OmniGlobe is one of five in Texas and is the largest in the state. A touch-screen transforms the sphere into a high-tech model of the planets. View everything from weather events to population density on this striking machine.

Next we moved on to the T. Boone Pickens Pure Energy gallery. This is Madison’s favorite. The Arboretum’s site sums up this gallery quite nicely:

Here you will witness the transformation of water, solar and wind energy into electricity. Use interactive wind models and a variety of turbines to determine which machines are the most effective. Test wind speed using fun anemometers and step inside our wind machine to feel its power. Archimedes’ screw and other machines will teach about harnessing the power of water.

There’s even a machine you can feel what it’s like to be in a tornado!

The next stop was for a hands on learning activity at the Texas Native Wetlands gallery.

Madison was able to see a lot of native Texas insects and wildlife up close! She was able to scoop out baby fish and look at them through a magnifying glass as well as plants and insects taken right out of the wetlands gallery area! She saw frogs and dragonflies. She learned a lot from the volunteers and had a ton of fun!

As the temperature rose, we opted to head home, but not before passing through the the Amazing Secret Garden gallery.

 

We cannot wait to go back again and this was a perfect weekend activity before starting our second week of homeschool!