Saturday, August 25, 2012

Field Trip Friday: The Bone Room and The Great Stoneface Park in Berkeley

This Friday, Aidyn, his grandma, and I ventured to Berkeley's  Bone Room and their quaint (but Great!) Stoneface Park.


The Bone Room is a natural history store full of sticks and stones and feathery plumes. The place is packed with the unusual, everything from real human skulls and radiuses (radiusi?) to freeze-dried lizards and fossil dung.

Oh, yes.

We decided to make the trek because we just finished reading the first two chapters of Story of the World and learned about fossils and other little things that creatures leave behind. Earlier in the week, Aidyn made a mold of his hand after we watched an episode of Beakman's World on fossils.

 
We mixed a 2-to-1 solution of Plaster of Paris.
 

The hardest part for Aidyn was keeping still for 15 minutes. It was a challenge in patience.


Anyway, we went to the Bone Room to check out some real bones and fossils. There were counters full, shelves full, drawers bursting full, and little jars full and stuffed creatures mounted everywhere. Probably to scare the hell out of  amuse people like me, they had a gigantic Burmese python that looked like this one we saw at a library program a couple months ago:



We all had fun picking out little treasures to take home. Aidyn plucked a T-Rex flip book and a scorpion necklace (with a real, but thankfully dead, scorpion), his grandma purchased a spider necklace, and I grabbed some bone beads (for math next week, of course), obsidian arrowheads, a scorpion bottle opener for David, and a antique-y looking poster of the human skeleton.

We had lunch afterward in a cozy, colorful taqueria,


and, to get the wiggles out, we found a fitting park called The Great Stoneface Park. Nestled in the hills of a quaint neighborhood in Berkeley, a small corner of the natural face of the mountain is preserved. In the middle of these gorgeous homes, large (and I mean, large) boulders and oak trees remain.

 
Aidyn wasted no time scaling up the trees and rocks like the proud Capricorn goat that he is.

 
Here's a good shot of Aidyn and his grandma.
 
 
And here's Aidyn and I.
 


 
He was so in his element.

Here he got a little wistful and asked if we could move there so he could climb this tree forever.



And to think he could have been sitting at a desk all day.

 




 
 

1 comment:

  1. What a great trip! I would love to go to a store like that! Thanks for linking up!

    ReplyDelete