The National Building Museum hosted their annual Scout Days last month with over 600 girl scouts and cub scouts taking part. Activities included recognizing and solving design problems, testing civil and aerodynamic engineering principles, weighing environmental issues and learning to "read" the buildings around them. The Main Hall was filled with scouts drawing, creating and building and the Metro that afternoon was full of projects.
One activity included drawing a plan, elevation and section of a pepper (capsicum). The NBM have used peppers regularly to demonstrate this concept and have recently had ceramic peppers made for use in all their drawing programs.
the ever popular trebuchet with a plastic spoon and cotton ball
Each year, the National Cherry Blossom Festival commemorates the 1912
gift of 3,000 cherry trees from Mayor Yukio Ozaki of Tokyo to the city
of Washington, DC. The initial gift was represented by twelve varieties of which two, the Yoshino(white) and Kwanzan (pale pink), now dominate.
The gift and annual celebration honor the friendship between the United
States and Japan. Thousands of tourists have been in DC hoping that sometime between March 20th and April 14th they will all blossom. There are parades, exhibitions, cherry blossom fun
runs, bus tours, boat tours and even cherry coloured food events.
We feel we saw them at their peak on April 10th, on an unusually hot spring day.
By the weekend they'll be gone.
The Newseum is a 250,000-square-foot museum of news history, showcasing technology over seven levels of galleries. A museum you can easily spend days in, in fact your entry ticket allows you to return the following day. There's also a wonderful cafe and restaurant run by Wolfgang Puck.
The museum's goal is to educate the public on the value of a
free press in a free society, to tell the stories of the world's
important events and to take you behind the scenes to experience how and why news is made.
Great resources for classroom teachers. See Digital Classroom link at the bottom of the page.
original newspapers dating from 1455
quote from U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren
The building was designed by the New York City-based Polshek Partnership and described by them as "a kind of giant, three-dimensional newspaper whose primary purpose is to communicate the nature of news to a diverse audience: that is, the press as a “window on the world.”"
The exterior of the building includes a 74-foot-high marble engraving of the First Amendment and the interior is filled with wall engravings of news related quotes.
quote from Justice Thurgood Marshal, US Supreme Court
Award winning series of portraits of African American activists, the White House News Photographers Association
Personal highlights included the photography throughout, the 9/11 exhibit and an exhibition on the Berlin Wall. The exhibit contains the largest display of unaltered portions of the original wall outside of Germany, a three-story East German guard tower saved from demolition near Checkpoint Charlie and a small piece of the wall you can touch.
Berlin Wall sections showed from the West
East German guard tower
World Trade Center antennae in the 9/11 exhibit
front page covers from around the world on 9/11
Journalist Memorial, a tribute to journalists who have died pursuing the news. Names are etched in glass on the left and images added to a wall on the right
