Lapworth Museum

We visited Lapworth Museum to learn about skeletons and fossils in a little more detail - mainly to see the allosaurus on display!

The museum doesn't open until 12pm on a weekend (I thought it opened at 10am ) so we arrived on campus half an hour before opening time... But alhamdulillah the weather was fine so we used the time for a quick trip down memory lane - we walked through the university centre (where everything was closed lol) and up the stairs to one of the lecture theatres, but it was locked! And past the Old Gym (which isn't so old anymore!) where my husband and I met. 💕😂 The campus was pretty much dead when we arrived but by midday lots of people started arriving - so we used all this for a short discussion about uni life and student habits. 😀

Inside Lapworth, we looked at all the skeletons on display - revising our work on herbivores/carnivores and using fossils for clues. F had recently asked if there were any flying dinosaurs to which I'd answered pterodactyl, and fortunately there was one on display hanging from the ceiling.

allosaurus cast

pterodactyl cast

allosaurus skull - feel its teeth!

another carniverous dinosaur...

hippopotamus skull

Most of the exhibits just showed parts of the skeleton as opposed to the whole thing, eg the femur of a stegosaurus, so there were some good opportunities to revise bone names and find the equivalent on their own bodies.

Surprisingly for me though, the part of the museum they enjoyed the most was looking at all the different rocks and gemstones upstairs!

rock wall - feel and describe their textures!

my favourite stone because it's my favourite colour~

their feedback in the bottom right!

We managed to look around the whole museum comfortably in just over an hour. Definitely somewhere worth visiting again next time we're on campus or when it ties in with another topic inshaAllah!

When we got home, I put out the Fossils book we have:

I really like this book series, but this served as a reminder how careful we need to be with the educational material we give to our children - especially when it looks like a trusted source - since the last few pages of the book are dedicated to the theory of humans evolving from apes and present it as non-disputable fact:

I don't wish for the girls to grow up sheltered, so I thought since it came up we may as well discuss it. Rather than censor the page completely, I decided to stick some flaps over the top instead with the following:

So the girls can still see the information underneath, but they can treat it in the same way as they treat beliefs from other religions.

We also spoke a little about scientific theory and how the principle is correct, to have a prediction and look for evidence (just like we do for our experiments!), but how important it is not to have preconceived biases or we end up with the wrong conclusions.