Monday, March 4, 2013

Keep It Local: Family Story Time at the National Museum of the American Indian


We've been to the National Museum of the American Indian's imagiNATIONS activity center several times before, but never quite made it to one of their family storytimes, which are usually held on Sundays and Wednesdays at 11:15 a.m. So we took the opportunity of our "day off of school because daddy stole our keys" a few weeks ago to go to the Wednesday storytime.

It turned out to be super neat. I was all for it. Kane pretended to object because he just wanted to play in the stilt house kitchen, but we caught him standing still and listening (hidden from our view of course). He couldn't help it -- the book being read was a "trickster tale," called "Love and Roast Chicken: A Trickster Tale from the Andes Mountains" and told the story of a clever guinea pig who used his wits to outtrick a hungry fox. It was really funny and the reader taught us several Indian words used in the book (including "wawa," which in at least one Indian dialect means child. mom said that makes total sense -- the reader explained that Indians frequently named things based on the sound that they make and, well, according to mom, sometimes it sounds like all we say is "wawa wawa wawa ....") AND there were puppets to go along with the story. There were lots of little littles there, but we'd say we were just about the right age to get the story and the interactiveness of learning Indian words.


Afterwards, the center emptied out and we had the run of the place. We spent most of our time building the igloo, which has finally been returned to the center. We can see why it was taken out (it was hard for us not to turn the igloo circle into a WWF ring), but are glad it's back. We built and destroyed it several times and even brought in fish from the stilt house to cook.


We're going to guess the Sunday story hour is crowded (although we actually have no idea), but we'll definitely go back some other Wednesday we're "off" of school!

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