finishing up chicken week

We wound down our week with another trip back to the children's museum yesterday (dragging along some of our other homeschooling friends too!). Their resident rooster was crowing up a storm (J's crowing back at him in this photo), which led to a nice discussion on the difference between roosters and hens, and how our hens' eggs can't hatch into chicks because we don't have a rooster, so they can't be fertilized. The rooster did a bang-up job reminding us all as to why we DON'T have a rooster. NOISY!!
We also visited with the stuffed rooster that sits on top of the find-the-eggs chicken coop display/game in the farm room. The kids discovered that if you reach into certain spots in the coop, a recording of a rooster crowing or a hen clucking gets set off. Needless to say, there was a LOT of noise in the farm room yesterday!
And of course the kids had to get in on the action and "be" chickens and roosters too. Poor Zoo Boy got left out of photos on this trip because my camera battery died.

While we were at the museum, in addition to playing for quite awhile in the farm room, the kids and I also spent quite a bit of time reading books in the animal room. This museum has such a great, laid-back attitude, and plenty of room for spreading out and getting comfy, we just all made ourselves at home on the floor in a corner of the animal room and dove into the pile of books on the shelf there. We read about the various animals on display, running to their cages to peek in and talk about what the book said about them, and crawling around pretending WE were the animals. Lots of fun! We also got to meet the museum's female Ball Python (we met the male on Tuesday when we were there) during a short "meet an animal" program they held while we were there. Such a wonderful museum, I'm so happy to have finally "discovered" it! Made for a lot of fun and learning on a rainy afternoon.