Dayton Museum of Natural History

My parents took my brother and I to the Dayton Museum of Natural History when I was in the forth grade. We studied a variety of courses and explored the natural world all summer. The courses included native plants, directing a planetarium and learning about astronomy, archaeology of a mastodon site and a hopewell village. We also dissected different animals, cooked a variety of roots and made salads from native plants. These years instilled in us a great value for the land we live upon and provided kinesthetic learning opportunities. I went there with my best friend who also remembers building an exhibit about marshes and forest soils - we won first place. This experience gave me the idea that I should become an archaeologist - I thoroughly enjoyed being outdoors and I enjoyed the game of excavating prehistoric bones and ancient tools.

Our summers seemed to be too short as I always learned more about nature at that museum than I did in school. We also went on fossil hunts where their were trilobites and ancient mollusks and sea creatures. It was always a challenge that our teachers gave us. We were given a list of edible plants to collect and off we went to find a specimen. Then we prepared the foods and had an interesting lunch. One class was on ornithology as well and our teachers were from the local colleges. I became acquainted with many bird species in the area and again our teachers took us on hikes to identify different birds. What a difficult task when they fly so fast and are soaring high in the air. We also collected butterflies and had collections of them.

The museum also had a neat collection of wild animals, a owl,a tarantula and other spiders, a bee colony, butterflies, a vcariety of insects, a fox and an incubator for chickens. There was a large house associated with the museum where we viewed a collection of insects and beetles from Africa which were brought from an instructor who studied there.

As an undergraduate student I worked at the museum part time and labelled and cleaned some of the mastodon bones and catalogued the artifacts from that site. I also cleaned and catalogued artifacts from the Hopewell village site. I worked to design an exhibit for the Mastodon site. It was through a work study program that I got paid for my work during college.