Portland Off the Beaten Path - Science & Art Field Trip

It’s been a hot summer in Portland!  Needless to say, we’ve spent quite a few days lounging at our local pool.  We also got to travel this summer and see family we hadn’t seen in a long time.  In short, this summer has been awesome!
With all this relaxing, I wanted to make sure the kids’ brains wouldn't totally turn to mush so I planned an educational “field trip” that was super fun and therefore kid approved. This memorable experience got me as excited as a little kid and may inspire you to look into unexpected resources where you live, to learn and explore. 

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This past week, we visited the Portland State University Science & Teaching Center.  Right in the heart of downtown Portland, the kids and I walked onto PSU’s campus with not only sketchbooks in our backpacks but also a few bones we had recently found on a remote hike in the Oregon wilderness.  The bones looked like vertebrae bones of a fairly large animal as well as a jaw bone but we weren’t sure what animal they were from. Before our visit, we contacted one of the biology professors and she was so very friendly!  

She graciously offered to take a look at the bones and help our kids identify them.  From “what is biology,” to problems facing local wildlife at the Oregon Coast to talk about herbivores and carnivores, our kids learned so much!  After studying the bones of some different types of animals, we concluded that the bones must have been from a deer.  Considering the deer populations in Oregon, that made a lot of sense! 

The lobby of the PSU Science & Teaching Center has a great variety of “articulations,” basically exhibits of animal skeletons.  On both the first and second floors, you will find skeletons of cougar, python, grizzly bear, porpoise, orangutan, spider monkey, sea lion and many more. Our kids were most impressed by the skeleton of a whale, suspended from the ceiling on the second floor.  On this floor, you can also find a case with mounted birds.  We enjoyed quietly sitting on the couch in the lobby (shhh…college students at work!) and sketching some of these fascinating items.  Science and art…. they go well together!

If you live in Portland, I would encourage you to take a field trip or artist’s date to the lobby at this PSU building.  If you are not from Portland, you may inform if a university near where you live has similar resources open to the public.  Or as an alternative idea, encourage the kids to bring their sketchbooks next time you go to that dinosaur exhibit or to the zoo or even the park.  It’s amazing what interesting questions the kids pose when they take the time to study a particular animal or object.  Leaving campus, our brains felt full with new information and our sketchbooks contained some pretty cool sketches that will serve as a wonderful memory of a successful summer break day.