Sleeping with the Dinosaurs: Stevenson Students Spend Night at Science Museum

“They’re a little bigger than we thought they were,” fourth-grader Daunte Hill said about the dinosaurs.

Hill’s friend Daniel Nicholson agreed.

“At first we thought they were about six feet tall,” he said. “Turns out they were about eight feet tall.”

Hill and Nicholson are two of the about 100 Stevenson fourth graders who spent the night at the Science Museum of Minnesota Thursday evening, slept under dinosaurs, toured the museum’s exhibits, watched an immersive “Omnitheater” movie about the deep sea and pigged out on a pizza buffet.

Katie LaFleur, a fourth grade teacher at Stevenson, said that while she didn’t specifically prepare her students for the trip to the museum, she taught units in rocks and minerals and in electricity and magnetism, and students took a field trip to the .

The night at the museum, which was largely funded by the refining and chemicals company Flint Hills Resources, was used as a motivational tool for good behavior in the classroom.

“Only the people who turned in their homework and only had one missing assignment or less were allowed to go here,” fourth grader Esella Beison said.

By Thursday afternoon Beison and the small group of her classmates with which she explored the museum had reached a consensus that the brain exhibit was their favorite.

“There was a girl who would open a lever, and water would come out, and it was supposed to be like a girl sneezing,” Beison said.