Octonauts Octo Glow Explorers at Sea Life Birmingham

Earlier this week, the girls and I headed to the National Sea Life Centre, Birmingham to check out their Octo-Glow Explorers event. We are delighted to be blogger ambassadors for Sea Life Birmingham this year. We’ll be heading there regularly to review all the latest events.

Relaxing at the Sea Life Centre

Whenever we head to the National Sea Life Centre, my reviews focus around the children. But I thought it was worth putting together a quick video to show you how relaxing it is for everyone.

Interactive sea life

I’m a big fan of interactive learning. Libby in particular is always keen to get stuck in with any hands-on activities at the National Sea Life Centre. This week, she was particularly delighted at being able to touch both shark and ray eggs.

There is always the opportunity to go through tunnels, touch creatures, listen to talks and watch penguins being fed. This time, there was a particularly exciting moment when they were able to catch a glimpse of the baby penguin. Both girls knew that the fluffy one was the baby. That was despite the best efforts of the little penguin on the left hand side of this photo, who seemed to be playing up to the crowd. He managed to get everybody’s attention despite the presence of the baby!

The Octopus Hideout

The octopus hideout is a new exhibit, where visitors can get up close to these intelligent creatures. The octopus is known for being a master of disguise and when we visited the disguise was going well, we couldn’t see Beverley the giant pacific octopus anywhere! Luckily, we were all happy with seeing the fabulous colour-changing cuttlefish instead.

The Octo-Glow Explorers event

The Octonauts are quite regular visitors to the Sea Life Centre. This time, they’ve arrived to teach children how deep-sea creatures use light to hide from predators, attract prey and communicate. Children can head into Shellington’s Octo-Glow Lab to do some simple experiments. Each experiment has a focus on light. I thought this was a fascinating exhibit. The children learnt lots of science facts during their time in the lab.

Tasks varied from shining a light onto coral to see the effect of algae, to using Morse code to communicate a message. Children were given a sticker for completing each task, and were able to exchange a completed sticker book for a pop badge at the end. There was also a meet and greet with Peso at the, which my girls were delighted about!