390 seats sometimes just aren't enough. The theater frequently plays to sold-out crowds.
EXHIBIT FIELD TRIPS!
Downloadable School Program Planner - PDF
Group Services will begin taking Field Trip reservations on August 15, 2011
Our exhibits provide a wide range of interactive experiences that will enhance your classroom curriculum. Check out our website for the most up-to-date exhibit information, pre- and post-visit activities, and resources for your use.
FAST FACTS:
Exhibit Field Trips
To book: Group Services: 817-255-9440
Dates: September 6, 2011 - May 25, 2012
Fee: $5 per student
Group Minimum: 15
Required Adults: admitted free (PK-K 1: adult/6 students); Grades 1-12: 1 adult/10 students)
Additional Adults: $5.00
Tried and True favorites: Our Permanent Exhibitions in the Museum
On the first level:
Energy Blast
Suggested Grade level: 3rd- 12th grade
How did the natural gas form underground? How do we know where to find the natural gas? Just what is directional drilling and how does it happen? What are the other types of energy? These are a few of the questions your students will uncover in this exhibit. Energy Blast provides opportunities to learn more about and increase their understanding of the large natural gas reservoir that resides under North Texas known as the Barnett Shale. Your journey will begin as you view a 4-D film about the origin of the Barnett Shale and the technology necessary to extract it. Next you will enter a field site to learn more about the process of extracting the natural gas. As you move on, the Energy Challenge area will showcase the costs, benefits and challenges of a number of energy sources and the changes that will occur to meet our future energy needs.
DinoLabs
Suggested Grade level: 1st-12th grade
Greeted by Paluxysaurus jonesi, the Texas state dinosaur, you and your students will learn about North Texas’ prehistoric past. In DinoLabs guests will have the opportunity to use the scientific processes to discover dinosaur fossils at field sites, analyze fossils in a laboratory setting and create images of what dinosaurs may have looked like. You will also examine fossil and cast specimens of several native dinosaur species that lived in this area between 112 and 95 million years ago. This exhibit also features three life-sized articulated skeletons including Tenontosaurus, a small plant-eating ornithopod, and Paluxysaurus jonesi.
DinoDig®
Suggested Grade Level: Kindergarten-12th grade
DinoDig, a model of the Jones Ranch dig site in North Texas, is the site where Paluxysaurus jonesi was found. Paluxysaurus jonesi is our Texas state dinosaur. In this interactive area, students will become a “paleontologist for a day” as they learn how to find fossils, document their location, carefully dig them up, and securely pack them for transportation to the lab.
Storm School
On selected Wednesdays, Meteorologist Jeff Jamison from the CBS 11/TXA 21 Storm Team presents interactive activities explaining the science of weather for small school groups (45 students and under, Grades 3-5). A portion of each week’s presentation airs on the CBS 11 News at 4 p.m. and/or the TXA 21 News (7-9 p.m.) later that day.
Two of our exhibit areas have grade level restrictions. The Fort Worth Children’s Museum is available for 2nd grade and younger. Innovation Studios is available for students in 3rd grade and above. Please note the grade level restrictions for these areas.
The Fort Worth Children’s Museum Gallery
Only available for 2nd grade and younger
The Fort Worth Children’s Museum gallery encourages students second grade and younger to experience the joy of discovery. In the Healthy Kids area, students may role play in the ambulance, scan their height, examine X-rays and care for infants in their bassinets. Grocery shopping will build critical thinking skills as they make choices, sort and classify. The Construction area allows experimentation with building blocks and train tracks. In the Natural Science area students may explore specimens from the Museum’s rich collections. Outside students’ explore Water Works and Build a House, designed in a secure environment with special cushioned flooring that is safe for all. The Children’s Trolley provides the perfect place for the Museum’s youngest guest to engage in physical activities, story times and explorations. A visit to the Fort Worth Children’s Museum will offer learning opportunities as children play and create lifelong memories of their best field trip ever.
Innovation Gallery
Open to all guests
Transforming lives through extraordinary learning environments
Innovation Gallery helps set the stage for unique opportunities that nurture your imagination, curiosity and creativity supporting science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. In the Central Gallery your students will have opportunities to use whimsical materials and Keva building blocks that offer opportunities to engage their critical thinking skills, test their mathematical reasoning and collaboratively solve problems. Gracing the center of this gallery is Dreamtime, an illuminated sculpture created from discarded items. Its whimsical creativity inspires curiosity and imagination. In the Back Gallery, your students will have the opportunity to explore the forces of gravity, lift, thrust, and drag in Air Park. Build paper airplanes and launch them on a runway, investigate Bernoulli’s Principle, design a pinwheel for the Pinwheel Garden and see our 33-foot hang glider.
Innovation Studios
Only available for 3rd grade and above
Imagine, create, explore and design are all a part of what your students will do as they experience the three studios, Inventor, Imaginer and Designed in this gallery. These spaces provide opportunities for your student in 3rd grade and up to take a deeper look at concepts to develop new understandings and ignite their curiosity. To find out more about what is happening in these spaces click on this link to take you to our monthly calendar.
On the Second Level:
The Noble Planetarium Exhibit Hall
Suggested Grade level: Kindergarten – 12th grade
Make discoveries in the Noble Planetarium’s pre-show exhibits area! Live views of our own Sun…as it looks today through the eyes of our own Charlie Noble Solar Observatory, just in time for the beginning of the Sun’s Solar Max cycle.
ViewSpace provides the very latest news about astronomy and space-based earth science, including the latest from the newly repaired Hubble Space Telescope. See the latest digitized panorama of our own Milky Way Galaxy.
This space also features the Tarrant County 100-pound Blue Mound nickel-iron meteorite and a rare stony-iron meteorite from the Brenham field in Kansas that weighs 320 pounds. View a real Sputnik and a life-sized astronaut hanging from the ceiling.
The Cattle Raisers Museum
Suggested Grade Level: Kindergarten – 12th grade
The Cattle Raisers Museum, a museum within the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the vital history and science of the cattle industry. The experience begins as you trace the origins and development of ranching as both an industry and cultural phenomenon in the 1850’s and takes you on a journey of the cattle industry and into the future of the business.
Your students will enjoy artifacts such as cattle and horses, barbed wire, branding irons and the inter-actives including Ride-A-Long Round Up and Run A Ranch.
Don’t miss Thundering Herd, a short multimedia historical presentation in the Noble Planetarium. It features life in the cattle industry today, its evolution into the Southwest, and then finishes with a spectacular stampede. Presentation times are: 10:45 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m. and 1:45 p.m.. This presentation is included with exhibit admission.
For additional resources and instructional information about the Cattle Raisers Museum, contact: David Bedford, Cattle Raisers Museum Educator
817.255.9342
Traveling exhibits
The Museum also features Traveling Exhibits that rotate throughout the year. Always check our website for updated information for times that these exhibit areas are closed as we strike one exhibit and install another in its place.
Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary
September 24-November 27, 2011
Suggested Grade Level: 3-12
The oil paintings, drawings, and field sketches of Alexandre Hogue are primarily of Southwest landscapes and represent a vital link in Texas history.
Discover the Real George Washington
October 15, 2011-January 22, 2012
Suggested Grade Level: K-12
This exhibition goes beyond the iconic image on the dollar bill to reveal the real George Washington as not only a general and president but as a young land surveyor, experimental farmer, and savvy entrepreneur.
Forgotten Gateway: Coming to America through Galveston Island
December 17, 2011-April 1, 2012
Suggested Grade level: Grades 4-12
Galveston Island played a major role as a transoceanic gateway for over 150,000 newcomers to America in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Experience this lens of immigrant history through this interactive exhibit.
Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body
February 25, 2012-May 25, 2012
Suggested Grade Level: K-12
A science-in-disguise exhibition where kids get the answers to many of the slimy, oozy, crusty, stinky questions they absolutely love to ask about the human body.
Call for reservations 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
817-255-9440 or toll-free 1-888-255-9300, ext. 440
