CSI

The forcast today said the temperatures should reach 100 by mid afternoon, so we opted for an indoor activity today and I'm glad we did. We went to the Natural History Museum on campus and they had a special CSI - Crime Scene Investigation - exhibt set up throught the museum.

The kids got to have their mug shoots taken:


And they also had a vareity of other activities the kids could participate in to see how crimes are solved. Here are a few of the different things they had set up:

• Ink pads to make your thumb print - they could then use a magnifing glass to figure out which of the 4 or 5 main categories of prints they had
• Styrophome plates cut into quarters. Each person at the table was to bite into a plate and a piece of cheese, then you were to compair the teeth marks in the cheese to those in the plate and match up the cheese to the correct plate and person.
• The difference between human blood and other blood - mice, dog, reptile
• The difference between human hair and other animal hair
• Powdered substance identification (below picture) ... in this case there was the powder found at the crime scene, and then the powder found on four suspects... flour, baking soda, salt and powdered sugar. Using iodine, vinegar and a magnifing glass, they showed the kids how to identify their unknown substance (flour).
• Fiber identification -- cotton, silk, nylon, rayon -- how does each fiber react when burned.
  
• Foot prints -- they had 5-6 different pairs of shoes and large ink pads and rollers so you could make different shoe prints.
  

Then throughtout the rest of the museum, they had set up little 30 second mysteries and clues to other crimes that you could search for and solve using the information you learned at the above mentioned stations. It was really interesting and the kids definately enjoyed it.

Afterwards we went downtown for pizza - the slices were huge! Sam and Emily shared a slice of pepperoni and did a good job of eating most of it. Rebecca got a slice of cheese and she ate atleast 75% of the slice on her own! The air conditioning in the building was broken - given how hot it was inside, I was surprise the kids ate anything.