Museum offers 'Summer Safari'

muscamp042: Museum offers 'Summer Safari'Children, ages 5-12, spent June 7-11 on "safari" without ever leaving the Kern County Museum grounds. Museum staff created activities and visual experiences that gave the children a feel of far away lands and times in the first of six week-long, themed, summer day camps called "Summer Safari."

"It's a blast but educational, too," said Jackie Brouillette, museum education and volunteer services manager. "History and Space will be part of the program, plus a chance for the children to take tours of different museum exhibits to learn about the past. One day of the week, we take the younger children to meet with their older peers who teach them what they have learned during their week at the museum. It's educational, but our philosophy is children learn best when they don't realize they are being taught. It is their vacation. So we make sure it is fun for them."

June 7-11 was "A Surfin' Safari" for the 5-8-year-olds and "A Celebration of Kern County Life — People, Past & Present" for the 9-12 age group. By the middle of the week, Julia Watson, Brenna McKay, Philip Field and all the others, ranging in age from 6-8, were cutting out flowers made from construction paper and stringing them together on yarn to create Hawaiian leis. As they worked, with help from museum staff and high school volunteers, the children excitedly talked about the big luau coming up at the end of the week. Earlier in the week, they had learned how to hula. It was only appropriate. Surfin Safari was a celebration of everything they learned about Hawaii all week long.

While their younger peers were busy in the Lori Brock Children's Discovery Center preparing for the big luau, Jacob Johannesen, Emma Borba, Jewel Crider, Kendall Chichester, Cassie Herrera and the rest of the older children were getting an education, frontier-style, in the old Norris, one-room school house. Actually, the education began on Monday, when they learned how to make adobe bricks, just as Kern County's early settlers did. By Tuesday, they were churning butter and washing clothes the way it was done before electricity and the invention of the washing machine.

"Making butter took a lot of time, but it was fun, and it tasted so good," Chichester said.

"She's probably going to get high cholesterol from eating so much of that butter," laughed Crider. "But, I think it is better tasting than what you buy at the store."

Chichester also talked about the experience of doing laundry as the pioneers did. "We filled a bucket with water, put the water in a metal washtub, used a metal plunger to push the clothes up and down in the water, then used a washboard to scrub the dirty parts off, before we finally folded and squeezed the water out, so we could hang the clothes to dry," Chichester said.

"It was fun doing it for a short time," Johannesen said. "But the pioneers had to work all day to get their chores done, and that's not much fun."

Under the supervision of volunteer docent Dale Hopwood, a former teacher, the children visited the museum's replica of an 1800s newspaper office to see how editors had to set each letter by hand on the old ink presses. They also toured the Barnes Log Cabin and took a general tour of the museum's frontier-style village of buildings.

On Friday, the older students joined the younger ones to share their knowledge from the week's experiences and to enjoy the luau. The next safari deals with science from June 28-July 1.

According to Brouillette, there are still some openings and such is the case for the museum's four other safaris. To find out more about the openings, themes, hours, costs and other details, you can contact Brouillette at (661) 852-5050 or e-mail her at jabrouillette@kern.org.


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