This week, Katie and Jack met us up in Santa Barbara again for me to buy my new camera lens (!!!) and check out the little sea center that’s part of our SB Natural History Museum membership.
It was pretty small, but I think we actually enjoyed ourselves more than at the Monterey Bay Aquarium because we almost had the place (and the excellent docents) to ourselves. They got to pet a ton of starfish, sea cucumbers, and other tidepool life.
Then the best part was hauling up a pail of water from the ocean and examining it on a screen…
…The kids got tweezers to pick out any little specs that might look interesting and stick them in a dish…
…Then we put them under a couple of microscopes and discovered that our dishes were actually full of life!
Katie and I agreed that it was the perfect homeschool field trip–all four kids got plenty of hands-on fun, asked the volunteer tons of questions, and really seemed to learn a lot!
(And while these pictures were taken with my handy dandy new 23-105 lens, I discovered it’s really hard to learn how to use a new lens while wearing a wriggly little girl in my pikkolo. Hopefully we’ll see some improvement soon!)