Science Detectives: Green Plants

Science Detectives: Green Plants runs at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences on Wednesday, October 21, from 10:30 to 11:30 AM. It's a one-hour class held in the Curiosity Classrooms, which are inside the museum at 11 W. Jones St. in downtown Raleigh.

The session is part of the Science Detectives series, which is built specifically for homeschool and track-out students. The whole idea is to take a single topic and go deeper into it than you would in a typical lesson, and this time the focus is on plant life. The class uses hands-on activities and role-playing to get kids involved, so they're doing things rather than just listening. During the hour, students observe plant structures and figure out how different plants survive in a variety of habitats—the kind of thing that's easier to wrap your head around when you're actually looking at the plants and working through it yourself.

It's a drop-off program, meaning you can leave your kids with the instructors and go do your own thing for the hour. The only catch is that adults have to stay inside the museum while the class is running, so you'll still be nearby if you need to be. If you've got a little one who's into nature or just likes to take things apart and see how they work, this is a good way to let them spend a morning doing exactly that.

Registration is $12 per participant, and if you're a museum member with a child aged 8 to 10, that drops to $9. The class runs from 10:30 to 11:30 AM on Wednesday, October 21, at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh.