Ian’s private tour of UP Diliman’s geology museum

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’d know that we have been happily homeschooling for four years now. For Ian this year, however, the set-up with his provider has been a hybrid one. As part of the hybrid set-up, Ian gets to attend online webinars with his teachers and classmates but as his parent, I still get to customize and supplement his learning through other activities. Aside from academics, Ian gets to do piano lessons, painting, science experiments, and the more recent one, taekwondo. He doesn’t even need to attend all his online classes as these are all recorded. The set-up gives us the flexibility to attend classes even when we are out of town so long as there is good internet connection. He’s attended classes while in the airport, when we visited Coron, and recently when he visited his dad in Benguet.

I got recently hired to be a research associate for the museum of the National Institute of Geological Sciences in our university. Last Thursday I thought I’d bring Ian to work with me so that he’ll see what I do, and why I’m often away during day time. I gave him a private tour of the museum to also assess how the museum displays are able to capture the attention of kids his age. Below are a series of photos I took of him during his independent exploration of the museum:

Ian loves to collect and read books. I read to him and his brother a lot when they were little. I used to read theatrically by changing my voice according to each character in the book while I read to them, to their amusement. It’s no surprise that the books were the first thing he looked at during his visit.

My favorite job as geologist is looking at 30 microns-thick slices of rocks for analysis (more on this later). So many things can be learned through microscopic analysis of rocks. It’s no surprise also that Ian was fascinated by the sand grains he saw through the museum’s digital microscope. Who knew sand grains would contain different types of rocks and fossils, right?

One of our favorite activities at home is assembling puzzles. I grew up assembling ones for play so it’s no surprise that patrons of the museum like Ian would be drawn to the Pangaea puzzle. It’s like solving the same question scientists like Alfred Wegener had about the puzzle fit of most continents on earth decades ago.

Ian, just like so many kids I met during my homeschooling meet-ups, is into fossils and dinosaurs. After finding out that I’m a geologist, kids would often come up to me during meet-ups and ask questions about my work and fossils. Unfortunately though, paleontology isn’t my expertise. That’s why when there are museum visitors, I make sure that there are fossil experts around to explain the section about fossils. The dig box in the photo above is crowd favorite. Ian enjoyed digging through the sand to look for the fossils buried in them. We love dig kits too that at one point, the kids and I made ones for ourselves and some to sell. They sold out like pancakes!

Our museum has dinosaur eggs. Yes, you read that right. I will say no more. Just come to the museum and be as amazed as Ian was.

Walking around got Ian a bit tired, he sat at one of the block chairs in the audio-visual section of the museum to watch science videos, including ones by Dr. Binocs, his favorite YouTube channel for science.

Ian got hungry around lunch time. We went down to the NIGS canteen to have lunch. Overall, Ian enjoyed his private tour of my workplace. Sharing below Ian’s presentation that he made about the museum: