Printing Press Museum Field Trip

As I was thinking about the Printing Press, I had a memory of visiting some museum in Provo with my mom (multiple times, even) where there was a model of the printing press and some moveable type. I looked it up—the Crandall Printing Museum. But it was gone, closed in the last few years sometime! I was sad.

But then my mom did some asking around and found that the Crandall had resurfaced in Alpine! Someone bought the stuff and was resurrecting the museum. They have a ton of cool historical items in their collection, like a Gutenberg Bible and the only working model of the Gutenberg Press! They also have a bunch of things related to the original printing of the Book of Mormon back in Joseph Smith's time, including a model of the Grandin Press. 

It turned out that the museum wasn't yet officially open in Alpine (the grand opening was coming up in a few weeks), but I got in touch with someone who worked there and she agreed to give us a tour! My mom came with us since she had so many fond memories of the original Crandall. :)

I was excited about the kids seeing the printing press model, but honestly, the tour was way better than I was even expecting. The lady who led it was interesting and fun, and I hadn't anticipated that we'd get to see every step of the process—including the way they poured lead into mold to make the moveable type! She actually showed us how that worked—heated the lead, poured it, and made some pieces of type for us to look at! It was fascinating!

See the little trail of liquid lead that hardened instantly into a wobbly line on the stone?

I was happy that Malachi ended up coming with us on this field trip, because he was fascinated and asked a million questions, and even ended up talking for a long time with the lady after the tour was over. They became great friends, apparently. She even let him take home one of the pieces of type as a souvenir!

There was definitely an art to the way they pushed the ink onto the type forms with a leather inkball. If you don't coat the whole form (it has a more precise name, but I've forgotten it…a case, maybe? a galley?) evenly with ink, you get empty spots on the finished page, as you can see we did above! Daisy and Junie got to help put the ink onto the type.

You also had to be very precise in the way you lined up the type over the page. Often they would do two printings for a page (if they wanted some of the text in red, for instance) and there was no room for error in pressing the second group down into exactly the right spot among the earlier group of words.

Malachi helped screw down the press mechanism to push the inked plates firmly down onto the blank page!

And then he hung up our finished pages to dry on a drying line!

And here is the Gutenberg Bible we got to see. I've only ever seen another in the British Library. They are so beautiful! I wish I had my own copy (in English, of course) :)

It was a wonderful field trip; one of the best. Just the sort of thing we love doing. I would totally go back and pay for another tour, now that the museum is up and running and they charge a fee for tours. We'd like  to do the tour where you learn about the Book of Mormon printing too!

Here's the information about museum tours if you, too, would like to go there!

https://www.thecrandall.org/tours

Gem Institute and Music Museum Field Trips

Since we were going to be in Carlsbad for the Flower Fields, we set up field trips at the Gem Institute and the Museum of Making Music while we were there. Both places take homeschool group tours, but you have to schedule in advance. At the Gem Institute you have to go past the guard booth and show your ID, which makes you feel kind of important. The tower on the front of the building has this beautiful sparkling crystal in the top.

It's not a huge museum, and none of my pictures are very good, but we loved seeing all the beautiful minerals and gems! This crystal pendant was hanging in the front window, and what you can't tell from the picture is that it's HUGE—probably as tall as Daisy. There are beautiful colored inclusions in the quartz, and when the sun comes through, it makes rainbow patterns on the walls and floor.

They did have some things the kids were allowed to touch. Hooray!

There were some interesting works of art made from gemstones—carved pieces like these, and others.

One of my favorite things was this display of orchestral instruments, all carved from precious stones.

I loved this. It's called Ametrine, and it's only found in one area of the world, where the minerals amethyst (the purple one) and citrine (the yellow one) occur naturally together. The sign said that at first, gemologists usually cut and faceted the stones with yellow on one side and purple on the other, but now they've found ways to cut them where the two colors join and blend, to give a more modern, free-form look. Aren't they all beautiful?

We always love malachite!

The display of opals was really beautiful. The museum had a birthstone exhibit that these were part of.

A rainbow of gemstones! I'll take one of each, please.

Our next stop, the Museum of Making Music, was great too. We had a whole tour and class, led by Mr. Bill (or Mr. Bob? or something like that) who was such a nice, friendly man. (He seemed greatly disappointed in us when none of the kids had heard of Elvis Presley, though.) First he had us sit in a drum circle and let the kids take turns conducting us. Adam LOVED that, as you can see.

So did Ben.

So did Daisy!

And at the end of the museum tour, there was a room with a whole bunch of different instruments the kids could try out! It was a little nerve-racking for Allison and me, keeping track of all ten of them and making sure no one dropped or broke anything, but the kids loved it!

Note Teddy in background, waving a zither or some such thing around

This was a great culmination of our Sound and Percussion Unit!

WWII Field Trips, and Bomber Activity

When she heard we were learning about World War II, one of our neighbors volunteered to tell us about her father and father-in-law's experiences in the war. We went over to her house one day and listened to stories about her father working as a radar operating aboard a submarine in the Pacific, and some of her husband's dad's memories about life before and during the War. It was fascinating! Hearing about what life was like in Salt Lake City, for regular families a lot like us, was a whole different perspective than the more generic one we got from most books about "War life in the United States." And, our friend also had her dad's old navy uniform and coat, which she showed us! It was pretty sobering to see Abe holding it up and think about how boys only a few years older than him were going off to war.

Warm lining from the Navy-issued coat her Dad wore

Another day, we drove up to the aircraft museum in Layton. We're always happy to have an excuse to visit the Hill Air Force Base, but this time our field trip was made extra awesome because we met friends there—and THEY brought their friend, a World War II Veteran, to talk to us! He was amazing. It was an honor to meet him.

The museum owns one of the very kinds of planes he flew in the war. He told us about being shot full of holes over Germany, and making an emergency landing with all his engines out. He was miraculously unhurt, but some of his crew were killed at their posts on that mission. It was incredible to hear about all this firsthand.

We also got to see one of the Norden bombsights, a cool innovation during the war that we'd read about in several airplane books

We didn't spend as much time on military planes as we might have, having covered them earlier during our Aviation Unit, but we did do an activity where we tried to drop gummy bears into paper cups on the ground while running past them at full speed. This is a very small taste of what pilots had to do when dropping bombs (and which the Norden bombsight helped with!). The children loved it.

Some of them took "at full speed" more literally than others...

Hill Air Force Museum Field Trip

Ky shows Goldie the B-17 Flying Fortress

We've been to the museum at Hill Air Force Base lots of times, but I must say this is the most we've (or maybe I should say I've; the children always like it a lot) ever enjoyed it! It's always somewhat cool to see big planes, but (for me, at least) it soon grows tedious when you don't really know what you're looking at. This time we were excited to see, in person, so many of the planes we had already learned about and grown to love! :) Also, I had assigned each boy one of the younger girls to be in charge of, and it was really cute to watch them. The boys were happy to show off their knowledge and discourse upon the various planes, and the girls liked having the attention and protection of their own personal tour guides. All I had to do was sit down and nurse Theo occasionally. It was great.

We were transfixed by this piston engine, cut away so you could see the various parts at work

Goldie fastens herself into the ejector seat

Little Goldie, big helicopter (I can't remember which helicopter this is)

Daisy, with another helicopter—Seb thinks it's the Bell 205 UH1D

Ky likes this fighter jet, the F-15 Eagle. We also like F-14s a lot (the moveable wing is so cool).

My favorite military plane—the SR-71 Blackbird. I just think it is such a cool plane! Both in looks and in functionality. I couldn't believe they had one at this museum! Have they always? I was definitely more excited about it than I've been before, if so.

The "Start cart" for the SR-71. Because the engines didn't have starter motors or anything, they had to fire them up using what is basically a mobile driveshaft to get the turbines turning. There was a video about it you could watch (you can see the TV screen inside the cart here). We thought it was so interesting!

The displays inside are great, and we even got to see some missionaries (they volunteer at the museum once a week, one of them told us—what a fun service opportunity!) towing one of the planes into the building with a pickup truck, which was cool. And then the planes outside were awesome too. They have added a few new ones since I last went to the museum, several years ago.

C-124. This thing is HUGE! We ate our little picnic lunch under the wing:

KC-135 "Stratotanker"

These KC-135's are the refueling planes that often refill other planes in midair. We had even seen one flying above us as we drove to the museum earlier! The boys were very excited to see it.

B-1B Lancer. I THINK this one is new-ish, too; at least I don't remember it from before. I like B-1s, but not as much as B-2s. I really want to see one of those fly someday.

One of the biggest planes we saw was this B-52 Stratofortress. It is just enormous! You can get a sense of it when you see how tiny the two little girls look next to its landing gear.

C130 Hercules

This is such a funny helicopter. The Piasecki H-21, nicknamed the "Flying Banana." You can see why!

Some missile or other

Seb by a big propeller. We can't remember which plane this was a part of!

Anyway, great museum. We're so lucky to have it close by!