PIE staff did the Wind Tubes activity at a museum-wide event in January, and it was such a big hit with visitors that the Marketing department asked if we could do it weekly as part of the Play Dates program.

Play Dates is a program that happens every Monday, and includes special activities around the museum for preschool-aged kids and their parents.  In addition to Wind Tubes, we'll use this opportunity to test out new gallery activities that we've been thinking about, including Light Play (shadows and reflection) and water activities. 

Last week, I helped with a two-day Kinetic Puppets class for 6-8 year olds. I've taught this before as a one-day class. The kids make two characters that move using bottle cap cams (Adam's project is on the right).

I'm playing around with the Musical Graphiti activity for the Sensor Garden Atelier coming up... Margaret and Keith developed this, and I wanted to make some nice programs to use the morning we do the activity in the workshop. Here's the setup. Margaret got some different drawing tools for us to try, and it seems like the Cretacolor Monolith 9B (extra soft) works really well. A regular pencil is ok, but it's more fun with this graphite stick.