Each host family organizes and acompanies our ISSE delegation on a field trip. Today, Claudia and her mother, Claudia, arranged the field trip. Claudia is my host while here in Mexico! We visited two places Universum, Museo de la Ciencias and Cuicuilco pyramid. We started the day by loading into an Olinca van!
Graham ISSE delegation in the Olinca van ready for an exciting day!
The Universum is a science museum!! It was my kind of a place...GREAT hands on activities and our guide was great. The museum was very big...we had a great guide, Guillermo who spoke English. It caught the kids attention right away when there was a dinosaur in front of the museum.
The dinosaur was outside the Universum Museum
We got to see three exhbits. The first exhibit was a Mathematics exhibit...it was all about seeing the beauty in math! The students really liked the hands on activities in this area. They looked at sculptures, mirrors, 3 dimensional shapes and played the Haolin tower game. They REALLY liked the tower game.
In this game, there are three pegs...you need to get all of the pieces from one peg to another. Of course there were rules...it was a challenging logic game!
The second exhibit was a space exhbit...we looked at magnitudes of 10, discussed the planets, played Universe Lotteria (which is like Bingo), played with a black hole model and used a telescope to look at a nearby building.
There was both a Newtonian telescope and a Galileon telescope...the students used the telescope to look at a nearby building.
The last exhibit was all about Mexico City. There was a model that showed the valley that houses Mexico City that used to be covered by a lagoon. We saw images of the city grow over time, saw the devastation of the Earthquake of 1985, jumped on a platform to watch what a seismograph would do and walked through a section that made you feel like you were in an Earthquake. My favorite part was a huge aeriel map of Mexico City that we could walk on. We found Olinca, the airport, the pyramid we would visit later and even the house I am staying in!
The students are looking at various parts of Mexico City using the big walk on aerial map!
After we left the museum, we ate our lunch in the van and headed over to Cuicuilco pyramid. It was a short drive! Cuicuilco pyramid is a circular earthen and volcanic rock pyramid. It is a significant archeological site that was occupied between 700 BC and 150 AD. Cuicuilco may be the oldest city in the Valley of Mexico.
Graham ISSE delegation at Cuicuilco pyramid - possibly the oldest civilization in the Mexico Valley!
Cuicuilco pyramid is surrounded by a natural area...here there were many different cacti and lizards! The kids tried really hard to catch them! I managaed to catch two with my camera...can you find them?
The students loved chasing lizards...we don't have lizards like this iin Ohio!
What's the best way to finish a day off of school on a field trip? How about ice cream?
We finished the day with Ice Cream from Tlapan market!
Tomorrow we will be travelling to Chapultepec Castle with Reni's dad! Stay tuned for more of our Mexican adventures! Signing off from Mexico City...Chantelle Rose, 2010 PolarTREC teacher