A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..

At tranquility base

Ferdy's learning about space at school so we decided to take a trip to the National Space Centre.

Something I have realised about going to museums with a three and a six year old, is that the more often you go to the same place, the better the experience and the more they seem to get from it. Whenever they go to a new museum or exhibition, they race around not really looking at anything, bashing any button they see (without waiting for the consequences) and seemingly not taking anything in at all.

I was, however, slightly heartened by seeing school groups of older children doing much the same thing. It seems perhaps that when they are presented with so much stuff to see and ingest, they find it difficult to focus.

After about an hour of racing, bashing and not looking, things calmed down a little and we were able to concentrate on a few things.

tl-br: The Moon; in a space shuttle; on the phone in 1969; lunar training

Gravity wheel

We did some astronaut training in Tranquility Base and worked out what supplies to take to the lunar base (quite a lot of chocolate); we went into a wormhole and saw what happens to stars when they die; we played with ping pong balls on the gravity wheel and we even went up to the moon in a rocket (lift) and saw a real piece of the moon.

Over lunch we drew pictures of aliens (whilst a rocket took off behind us) and made up alien words using digraph ng (a mooging is a cow and a soong is a mountain in alien language), played picture consequences and Ferdy invented a game where we had to draw something that we'd seen in the museum, put it behind our back and the other two guess what it was. Anakin Skywalker, Mace Windu and Kit Fisto must have been in a part of the museum I missed.

But we agreed that by far the best bit was the film we watched in the Planetarium called We Are Stars, which took us on a journey through space and time to show us the origins of life on earth and its connection to the universe. It was one of those immersive VR 360 degree films and felt so real we were all holding onto our seats in parts! It was utterly brill and Ferdy remarked on leaving, 'that film was even better than Star Wars I'. An accolade indeed.

Contemplating the universe?