Exploring the Galapagos Islands During Night at the Museum!

At six o’clock on a Friday night, twenty children and a few museum staff members gather in the lobby of Iowa Hall to talk about the Galapagos Islands, a small archipelago off the coast of Ecuador.  None of the children have been to the Galapagos, but the ongoing discussion helps create a picture of these islands.  Hot and volcanic, home to albatrosses, finches, and huge tortoises that glide across the water, it’s a far cry from a wintry Iowa evening. 

This Friday is just another Night at the Museum program, where children get a chance to learn about an exciting topic (previous months have included birds and my personal favorite, penguins) through games and discussions, having a lot of fun in the process.  This evening marks my fourth Night at the Museum – but for some children, this is their tenth program, or perhaps their first.  Some are nervous, some are chatty, but all happily discuss the islands before heading off to more activities.

In an upstairs room, the children play a game to learn the significance of different shaped beaks – which beak does the best job picking up pennies? What about beads? Or toothpicks? Some grapple with scissors, slicing the air as they try to get the blades around pennies.  Others persevere with two spoons, trying to scoop up beads without their hands.  And some happily pluck toothpicks with a pair of tweezers.  “I’ve got ten toothpicks!” one girl exclaims.  “Twelve!” calls out another.  Then we look at a slide show explaining the different beaks in nature, and the children try to call out the different birds they know – birds with “spoon beaks,” “scissor beaks,” “clothespin beaks,” and “tweezer beaks” all make the slide show. 

Later, the children eat pizza and watch The Wild Thornberrys – the show’s heroine, a girl named Eliza who can talk to animals, travels to the Galapagos – before heading up to Bird and Mammal Hall to play in the dark.  These halls, which are filled with all kinds of animals, somehow look different in the dark.  With your “miner helmet” on your head, you never know what your headlight might shine on next: an ostrich egg or a sparrow, a lion or a walrus.  Some of the children decide to run through the corridors, laughing hysterically and trying their hardest to scare their friends.  Others quietly work on scavenger hunts.  One little girl taps my shoulder – can you help me find this bird, she asks, and together we look through the different exhibits until we find the right bird.  She writes his name on her scavenger hunt triumphantly, proud to have found him.

At the end of the evening, the children try their hand at a turtle relay, in appreciation of the giant tortoises that roam the Galapagos.  They enthusiastically color their turtle shells, and then try to race around Mammal Hall while walking like a turtle – as the children have already discerned, it’s about both speed and technique.  (A good balance of the two is sure to provide a safe win!) As the judges, we hand out awards for Fastest Turtle and Most Turtle Like, which the children then take home to tack on the refrigerator.  And after the intensity of the turtle relay, the program ends with a necessary reading of Where the Wild Things Are in Iowa Hall.  Although some children know the story’s ending, it doesn’t diminish the potency of the writing or the intricacy of the illustrations, and one by one each child leaves, carrying a turtle shell, a booklet, and hopefully a picture of the Galapagos with them as they go.

Children often tend to see nature as birds and trees, or the Galapagos as a series of faraway islands, and nothing more.  At Night at the Museum, our job is to show them what nature really is – a wild, beautiful, and intricate world that surrounds us, in all its intensity, every day.

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian