Friday 11th June

This is a story composed with the children about our trip to the museum and what stood out about the trip for them.
On Friday we went to the museum. Before we left school we put on our safety vests and packed our lunch boxes and drink bottles into our school bags. We went in parents cars to the museum, we parked by the gardens. We walked over a bridge and on a path through the gardens. We saw lots of big trees, fantails, monarch butterflies and gum nuts. When we got to the museum we looked at the old street with the old shops. We saw an old dolls house, guns, bikes and pretend people. Then Anthony came and got us and took us to the Discovery Room. He had a giant bee, it was a girl because it had a stinger. When girl bees sting something they die. He told us about how they have 3 body parts and 6 legs. The bee had eyes on top of its head so that it could see things coming. Insects can’t walk in a straight line, they zigzag. We then talked about spiders. A spiders brain is where our tummies are and his tummy is in his head, cephalothoraxes. When his tummy gets full the food starts filling up his legs. Spiders can have 2,4,6,8 or 0 eyes. Spiders that have no eyes live in dark places like caves. Even though spiders and insects can have lots of eyes they can not see very well. We got to look at some tarantulas we saw Rod Nee the red kneed tarantula walking around his home and we also saw Coco, a Costa Rican striped knee tarantula, she was 16yrs old and could live to be 30.
King Kong was a Goliath Tarantula, he will grow as big as a dinner plate, he was hiding and he was hard to see. Anthony showed us Coco’s exoskeleton from when she had moulted. We went into a room and all the walls were butterflies. There were draws full of insects and spiders that we could have a look at. We played on the computers and looked at bugs under a microscope. When we had finished we looked at a mummy, she was wrapped in bandages and in a box, there were lots of little pictures painted on the box the pictures told her story instead of using letters and words. There was an

x-ray of her and we could see her skeleton. Then we went through the moa cave. We left the museum and had a picnic lunch at the playground, we got to play on the playground and then we went back to school.