Please contact ACM to add your children’s museum’s resources to this list.
Demonstrations continue to unfold around the world calling for an end to racist systems that oppress Black people and people of color. As institutions with a responsibility to the children and families in their communities, children’s museums are sharing tools to help families navigate difficult conversations about race and racism—including these resource guides:
6 Books That Can Help You Talk to Your Child about Race and Diversity
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (IN)
“We believe in the power of children to change the world around us. We cannot raise world-changers if we shy away from tough topics. We hope these books may empower children and their grown-ups to address these challenging topics with sensitivity and compassion, empowering children to make a difference in our communities—no matter how young.”
Anti-Racism Resources
National Children’s Museum (Washington, DC)
“For parents, for kids, for educators, and for all dreamers.”
Mourning and Making Meaningful Change
Minnesota Children’s Museum (St. Paul)
“We want to support kids and families as we find a path forward to unite, heal, and make meaningful change toward a just future where everyone in our community and throughout the world is treated with kindness, dignity and respect.”
Racial Equity Resources
Marbles Kids Museum (Raleigh, NC)
“Marbles believes in the power of play to unite communities around building bright futures for children. We believe in the power of play to break down barriers, celebrate diversity, and foster friendships. These beliefs shape our commitment to help a community shaken by unrest and racial inequity that impacts us all.”
Resources for Talking about Race and Equality
Children’s Museums of Pittsburgh and MuseumLab (PA)
“Racism and prejudice have a profound impact on children and families in Pittsburgh and across the world. We must teach our children to be kind and compassionate to everyone. We are all neighbors.”
Social Justice
Glazer Children’s Museum (Tampa, FL)
“We have created a page on our website filled with free resources for families about racism, trauma, violence, and the historic context of activism. This is just our small piece of the puzzle. To the black and brown families in our community – we are here for you. We will help you help your children through this.”
Talking to Children About Race (from Play Is Essential Work: A Parenting Guide)
The Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum (IL)
“Conversations about racial justice must start at home. Parents bear the responsibility of educating their children about race and racial injustice, no matter how difficult that conversation may seem to be. Your children are not too young to have a conversation about race. Below are some resources to start that conversation.”
Talking to Your Child about Race
Pretend City Children’s Museum (Irvine, CA)
“Children as young as infants can recognize differences in their appearances. As they explore the world around them, they begin to form their identity in relation to others. It is never too early to start having conversations that address the differences they see. Here are four ways you and your family can introduce race conversations to your child.”
What To Say When There Are No Words
Boston Children’s Museum and Children’s Services of Roxbury
“At this moment, we need to keep our children close and show them our ever-present unconditional love. Even the youngest children have a keen sense of fairness and right and wrong so we can talk to them honestly about justice in a way that is appropriate for their age and stage of development.”
The Associations of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
This post was originally published as ACM Trends Report 4.1, the first report in the fourth volume of ACM Trends Reports, produced in partnership between ACM and Knology. Read other reports in this series: ACM Trends Report 4.2, “Financial Impacts by Mid-May 2020,” ACM Trends Report 4.3, “Workforce Impacts,” and ACM Trends Report 4.4, “Impacts for Audiences and Partners.”
To understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the children’s museum field, we surveyed ACM member institutions from May 7 to 18, 2020 about their experiences. Overall, 109 US-based children’s museums and 6 non-US museums were represented in the responses. Here are several initial findings; future reports will provide more detail.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The Associations of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Knology produces practical social science for a better world. Follow Knology on Twitter.
This post was first sent to the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) membership as a Letter to the Field on June 1, 2020.
Children’s museums were born of the education reform movement in the early 1900s as a way to support children’s learning through play. Since then, children’s museums have remained focused on how to support children, guided by the tenets in the United Nation’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child, which state that children have the right to “develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity.”
We mourn the death of George Floyd. We mourn that America is built upon systems that oppress Black people and people of color. We mourn the violent protests that occur after peaceful protests go unheard and unrecognized. We mourn the repetition of this cycle over decades and centuries. We hope that this is a time for lasting and meaningful change.
Children’s museums have a responsibility to the children and families in their communities. This time is an upsetting one, and children feel this keenly. Over the past few days, many children’s museums have shared statements responding to ongoing protests throughout the United States, often including thoughtful resources for caregivers to talk about race and racism with their children. We are collecting these statements and sharing them on the ACM blog, which we will update as needed.
Children’s museums also have a responsibility to their employees to operate in equitable and anti-racist ways. At ACM, we have incorporated operational changes to help interrupt unconscious bias in our workplace. For example, when we hire, we publish a salary range, and also require salary ranges in the ACM Classifieds section of our website. Our family leave policies provide equal paid leave time for all employees, no matter their gender, who are new parents or caretakers for family members. We explicitly prioritize diversity in the recruitment of members to our Board of Directors, committees, task forces, and speakers in all of our programs. We recognize there is still more we can do, and we encourage you to take this time to inventory and assess your museum’s operational practices.
This moment comes at a time of transition for children’s museums. We encourage you to look at your internal practices, both to celebrate existing practices and establish new ones during this time of rebuilding. The Cultural Competence Learning Institute (CCLI)’s recent webinar, Reopening with Equity in Mind, may serve as a starting point for these conversations. You can find helpful resources and discussions on ACM Groupsite, as well as through the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s new online portal, Talking About Race.
Finally, we want to encourage you to consider the digital experiences you share with your community, particularly this week. These experiences are an opportunity to address race and systemic racism head-on in appropriate ways. Story time can feature books that address race and racism in age-appropriate ways. Parent resources can focus on talking to children about race and racism. Look to your peers for examples of content that your museum can share.
In ACM’s Strategic Roadmap, we affirm our belief that pursuing equity and inclusion is a best practice that reflects a commitment to serving all children and families and advancing the growth of our field. For more than a hundred years, children’s museums have spoken up about the needs of children—all children. Together, we envision a world that honors all children and respects the diverse ways in which they learn and develop. To create that world, right now, our children and their families need the spaces we create to model empathy and boldly stand for healing and justice.
Laura Huerta Migus is Executive Director of the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Starting in late May, demonstrations have unfolded throughout the United States—and around the world—in response to the death of George Floyd, seeking an end to racist systems that oppress Black people and people of color.
Children’s museums have a responsibility to the children and families in their communities. This time is an upsetting one, and children feel this keenly. Over the past few days, many children’s museums have shared statements responding to the protests and sharing resources for caregivers to talk about race and racism with their children. We share these statements and resources here.
This list is incomplete. Please contact ACM to add your children’s museum. Last updated July 1, 2020.
Minnesota Children’s Museum mourns the death of George Floyd and would like to express our deepest condolences to his family and friends. We are further saddened by the scenes of destruction we wake up to each morning.
Our organization values racial equity. We work toward equitable outcomes for members of racial and ethnic groups. We know that people of color and indigenous people in Minnesota experience levels of socioeconomic, legal and educational inequality that are among the worst in the nation.
Children in our community feel what’s happening. The museum wants to do what we can to support families. Please know that play helps. Play reduces anxiety. Play mitigates the effects of toxic stress. Play brings people together.
Read the full statement.
The tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery—three names in a too long list of others—have prompted all of us at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) to reflect on our role in our community and the values that guide us. We create play-based experiences that help young children and their families explore and make sense of their world. Right now, as we see families hurting, across our region and the country, that work feels especially daunting and also more important than ever. We are committed to doing the work to be a more inclusive and responsive community organization—to educating ourselves, to listening to the voices of our community, and to using our resources and power to tackle the inequities that divide and hurt us.
Read the full statement.
The Betty Brinn Children’s Museum believes that equity is foundational. We stand with the black community and those seeking transformative change against racism.
The Museum remains committed to providing inspiring and safe spaces for all children and families to play. We celebrate diversity and all that we can learn from one another to create a better, kinder world for our children. As lifelong learners, we have much to discover and much to do. Let’s do it together.
Read the full statement.
The killing of George Floyd unleashed a deep anguish, not just in the Black community, but across humanity, sparking protests around the world. The determination to be heard, to demand justice and recognition of a people’s humanity superseded the risk of becoming ill with the coronavirus. In fact, we are reminded that in this nation, racism, has been and continues to be the most pervasive pandemic in our American story. …
At this moment, we need to keep our children close and show them our ever-present unconditional love. Even the youngest children have a keen sense of fairness and right and wrong so we can talk to them honestly about justice in a way that is appropriate for their age and stage of development.
Read the full statement.
Today, Brooklyn Children’s Museum makes the following commitment to our community:
1. In all that we do, we will acknowledge and recognize that BCM exists in a historically Black neighborhood and that we owe a debt of gratitude to our community, mostly people of color, who have nurtured and sustained our institution for 120 years.
2. Understanding our role as a community anchor, BCM will work to open its doors to families as soon as it is safe. Stay tuned for more information about programming and performances on BCM’s roof as soon as the PAUSE is lifted.
3. We will continue to create experiences that ignite curiosity, celebrate identity and cultivate joyful learning. We will do this in an explicitly anti-racist way, in partnership and solidarity with our community.
Read the full statement.
As an institution dedicated to guiding children, youth and families to work together toward justice and expanded possibilities in their communities, we have a responsibility to speak up. All children, but especially Black children and other children of color, are traumatized by racism and inequality in our society. And, in times like these, they sense the fear and uncertainty felt by their grownups.
Real the full statement.
We know it is never too early to start honest, age-appropriate discussions with children about these issues. Our goal is to help you in your efforts to have these difficult but essential conversations.
38 Chicago-area organizations coordinated to share this statement from Chicago Community Trust, along with coordinated messaging.
As cultural organizations serving the people of Chicago, we stand in unified opposition to racism and injustice. We must each wrestle with the persistent stain of systemic inequality and its devastating impacts on our staff, members, guests and neighbors.
See Chicago Children’s Museum’s post and Kohl Children’s Museum’s post.
To create, play, and learn, one must first feel safe.
The Children’s Creativity Museum stands with Black children, caregivers, educators, and the entire Black community.
We ask our visitors to use their imagination to envision a future they would like to live in. In order to create the inclusive and equitable future we hope for, we must first actively speak and take action against the structural racism that holds us back.
#BlackLivesMatter
Read the full statement.
As a children’s museum, we are in the unique position to combat historical and systemic racism by promoting diversity, tolerance, inclusion, and cultural competence that starts with our community’s children. We want to help your family navigate these times in a hopeful and honest way that honors your children’s fears, curiosity, and anxiety. The goal for each of us should be to better understand the racial realities of the world and commit to what role we can all play in healing these wounds.
Read the full statement.
Children’s Museum of Atlanta believes that play fosters learning, and playing in an environment that exposes us to new ideas, beliefs, or values can teach us to appreciate and understand our differences and to celebrate our commonalities. In many ways, Children’s Museum of Atlanta serves as a ‘town square’ where all families are able to safely gather, connect, and learn together. We look forward to welcoming families back into our space and will continue to work towards mutual understanding, opportunities for open communication and exploration, and equitable outcomes for members of all racial and ethnic groups.
Read the full statement.
We believe Ruby Bridges said it best: “Racism is a grown-up disease.”
Talking about racism, prejudice, and discrimination can be uncomfortable. If we want to see real change in our world, we cannot shy away from these difficult conversations with our children. Through our words and actions, we must teach our children to be kind, compassionate, and caring to everyone.
Read the full statement.
The Children’s Museum of Manhattan condemns racism of all kinds. We are both town square and city park, a safe place for families of diverse backgrounds to gather side-by-side and learn together and from each other. What is happening now, and historically to the black community, is anathema to all we stand for.
By three years old, children have already absorbed notions of bias from those around them. Our job is to support families in raising open-hearted citizens. Over the next days and weeks, CMOM will be developing new initiatives that we can incorporate into our online Parenting in Place and CMOM at Home programming.
Read the full statement.
Our mission is to inspire growth in all children by engaging families in learning through play. We strive to be a place that provides equitable solutions for our community as a safe space for all families. We want our community, especially the members of our community who have been oppressed for far too long, to know that we are here for your children and family.
Children are experiencing stress during this time. The value of play cannot be underestimated for our youngest citizens; play reduces stress and brings people together. As families are looking for ways to talk to children about what is happening in Richmond and across the country, we want to help make resources available. Visit our blog for articles, activities, and books your family can use.
Read the full statement.
Talking about race, although hard, is necessary.
If we wish to inspire the change we want to see in the world, we need to engage in these difficult conversations with our children today.
See the full statement.
We at Discovery Gateway are incredibly saddened by the death of George Floyd and all acts of racial injustice. At Discovery Gateway it is our mission to inspire ALL children to imagine, discover, and connect with their world to make a difference. As a children’s museum, we are committed to bringing families together, celebrating diversity, being a catalyst for inclusion, and offering a platform for all communities to have a voice and teach our children.
Read the full statement.
While we are saddened to see the physical damage to the building, we realize there is a much deeper hurting across our community and country. Our windows can be repaired but a much longer process lies ahead to change the systemic issues that are fueling these events. We remain committed to helping Charlotte become a better community for everyone.
Read the full statement.
We are heartbroken by the trauma occurring across our country in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As a children’s museum, we want to speak to parents at this moment.
We often help children cope with traumatic events by referencing the advice of Fred Rogers to ‘look for the helpers.’ In times like this, it may be difficult to know who the helpers are. So, with respect to Mr. Rogers, today let’s be the helpers. For many children in our community right now, connecting to the world around them feels scary. It feels frustrating and confusing. But it is our job as adults to help our kids navigate the scary and learn to be helpers.
Read the full statement.
A message from our CEO, Maggie Lancaster
In addition to the damage to our building and to those of our downtown neighbors, our community woke up this morning with more questions than answers.
One thing is certain: loss of property pales in comparison to loss of human life. We understand that there is a lot of hurt within our community, and this knowledge bolsters our commitment to our mission and the important work of the museum. The need for play and the benefits that come through play are needed now more than ever. Open-ended play experiences, like the ones we’ve provided for nearly twenty-three years, have been proven to be effective interventions against chronic toxic stress, as well as proven tools for building empathy, self-love, and interpersonal communication skills. We are an incredible community, coming together to collectively prioritize the needs of children and families, especially those affected by systemic injustice.
Read the full statement.
Kidspace Children’s Museum condemns the violence and injustice that systemic racism inflicts on our communities, families and children. Black lives matter. As we prepare to reopen as a place of welcome and healing, we are collaborating with community partners to listen, learn, and together build an inclusive, anti-racist environment where all children are invited to play, create, grow, and thrive.
Read the full statement.
KidsPlay values all members of our community, especially those impacted by the traumatic effects of racism, violence, and discrimination. We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all other minorities and people of color to speak out against racism and injustice. We are committed to lifelong learning, positive change, and creating space for empathy, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We will continue to work with our community to do our part towards a peaceful and inclusive future.
Read the full statement.
As an educational institution, it always has and will be our mission to support families. During this time, we are standing with all black children and families. Conversations about race should start at home and using books as a tool to start those discussions can be a great resource. We have included two links that provide a variety of books that can help children of all ages see the faces of people that look like them or don’t and can be a step towards your learning journey. #blacklivesmatter
Read the full statement.
The damage and violence in our city is frightening and discouraging, but we should not let it diminish from the message of the peaceful demonstration, which drew much larger crowds earlier in the day. We stand with those who are demanding justice for George Floyd and an end to the systemic racism and white supremacy plaguing our country. This scourge diminishes every community’s capacity to raise whole, happy, healthy children.”
There’s much work to be done. As an organization deeply invested in creating a more just society, where all children and families can play and learn together, and as a cornerstone of our downtown, we will stay active in the conversation and the work. Please stay safe.
Read the full statement.
The New Children’s Museum embraces cultural diversity and welcomes children and families from all walks of life. We are united with our colleagues across the U.S. through the Association of Children’s Museums in being a safe and friendly place where we value people of all ages, abilities, races, ethnicities and economic circumstances. We are committed to being a community resource, both within our Museum as well as in economically and culturally diverse communities throughout San Diego.
Read the full statement.
The Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum believes in celebrating the diversity of Central Illinois and in providing opportunities for ALL children to become explorers and creators of the world, no matter their race, income, or background. Parents bear the responsibility of educating their children about race and racial injustice; PlayHouse staff want to support parents in this critical work by providing resources and programs to help. Your children are never too young to have a conversation about race. Teach them to speak out against injustice and fight for those whose voices are squandered by the systemic inequalities written into the fabric of our nation.
Play Africa stands against racism. We stand against all forms of injustice and inequality that Black people have faced and continue to face in South Africa, and around the world. We loudly and proudly proclaim that Black lives matter.
We believe using our platforms to learn, and to promote ubuntu, understanding, compassion and justice. We strive to create real, positive and lasting impact to help create a world where racism and injustice no longer limit abundant human potential.
Read the full statement.
We are heartbroken by the grief, pain and trauma that all of our community and our country are experiencing in the wake of the recent death of George Floyd. Far too often, people of color experience racism, injustice and numerous socioeconomic, legal, and educational inequalities – and we stand with and behind our visitors, members, staff and community who are experiencing hurt and sadness as a result.
Children in our community see and feel what is happening. This is a time to see their pain, help them understand and cope with it, and help them learn. And, in the spirit of Mr. Rogers—who suggested that children “look for the helpers”—we are here for you, we are listening, and we want to help.
Read the full statement.
We believe that human rights are universal and embrace humanity in all of its diversity. Therefore, Portland Children’s Museum reaffirms its commitment to:
• Amplify action for social justice on behalf of children and their rights to be safe, protected, and educated.
Read the full statement.
• Work toward an inclusive future in which societal institutions reinforcing systemic racism are replaced by ones that are open and accessible to all.
• Listen with an open heart and mind, with empathy, to families of every race, religion, and cultural background, so that their stories find expression and power.
Children’s museums serve not only as a place for play and joy, but to provide guidance and support. It is our role to support children and their caregivers as they navigate these feelings, and we have curated resources on our social media pages to speak to children about racism, trauma, violence, and activism.
We will always work towards greater equity and justice as that is the ultimate support for children.
Read the full statement.
6 Books That Can Help You Talk to Your Child About Race and Diversity, The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children, EmbraceRace
By Marianne Celano, PhD, ABPP, Marietta Collins, PhD, and Ann Hazzard, PhD, ABPP Illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin
An Activity Book For African American Families: Helping Children Cope with Crisis, National Black Child Development Institute (NBCDI) and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Resources for Talking about Race, Racism and Racialized Violence with Kids, The Center for Racial Justice in Education
Social Justice Resources, Glazer Children’s Museum
Talking about Race, National Museum of African American History and Culture
Talking to Children About Racial Bias, HealthyChildren.org
By Ashaunta Anderson, MD, MPH, MSHS, FAAP and Jacqueline Dougé, MD, MPH, FAAP
Your Kids Aren’t Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup, Pretty Good Design
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
This post was produced in collaboration with the Association of Science and Technology Centers.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, museums—like so many other institutions and sectors—are being asked to reimagine themselves: Will hands-on exhibits ever be the same? When and how can we reopen safely for our staff and our visitors? In the face of these existential questions, how can we keep equity front and center?
On May 19, the Cultural Competence Learning Institute (CCLI) hosted a webinar about the opportunities for culturally relevant practice for museums during this time of crisis. During the webinar:
Resources
Cultural Competence Learning Institute (CCLI) is a partnership between the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, the Association of Science and Technology Centers, the Association of Children’s Museums, and the Garibay Group.
This post was produced in collaboration with the Association of Science and Technology Centers.
Children’s museums and science centers have overwhelmingly closed in response to COVID-19. While museums can no longer welcome visitors, they are leveraging their facilities, knowledge, and community connections to remain responsive to their communities.
Throughout this crisis, limited supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline workers has been an ongoing concern. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) and Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) members embark on projects to help bolster PPE and face mask supplies.
3D printers can be found in many museum makerspaces—or behind the scenes, where designers use them to fabricate exhibits. In recent weeks, many museums are using this technology to create PPE! Museums are working in collaboration with their local partners, ensuring that what they produce meets local needs and standards of use:
Arizona Science Center (Phoenix) is part of a local effort to use 3D printers to produce face shields for medical workers at Banner Health.
DISCOVERY Children’s Museum (Las Vegas, NV) is using their 3D printers to make medical-grade headpieces for local healthcare professionals. Using both of the museum’s devices, they’re creating 25 face shields each day!
The Field Museum (Chicago, IL) is using their three 3D printers to make National Institutes of Health-approved face shields for Meals on Wheels volunteers and Northwestern Hospital. The museum is also donating unopened lab supplies to health organizations in need.
The Idaho Museum of Natural History (Pocatello) is working with Idaho State University to 3D print three different medical products: the “Montana Mask,” face straps, and face shields.
LaunchPAD Children’s Museum (Sioux City, IA) is 3D printing ear savers and face shield frames for hospital personnel on the frontlines. To get started, they collaborated with a technology company along with other local organizations.
MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation (Santa Barbara, CA) is 3D printing PPE for local healthcare workers in their Innovation Workshop, in collaboration with Santa Barbara Foundation, University of California Santa Barbara, Cottage Health, and local makers. The museum uses the 3D modeling program TinkerCad to create simple designs, and encourages families to explore possibilities, shapes, and variables with this free tool.
The Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) (Tampa, FL) responded to a call from the Moffitt Cancer Center seeking masks and has been using their 3D printers to make face shields for frontline staff.
Science North (Ontario, Canada) set up 3D printers in a staff member’s home, so they can work around the clock to make face masks for their local hospital.
The Science Spectrum and Omni Theater (Lubbock, TX) is 3D printing face shield headbands for West Texas hospitals and emergency units. The museum’s FabLab team got started after responding to a call from Texas Tech University and Texas Tech Health Sciences Center.
The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago (IL) is using twenty of their 3D printers to make face shields and masks for local hospitals. As of April 15, they had created 250 frames and 40 masks!
Western Science Center (Hemet, CA) is 3D printing face mask clips for their local hospital. The museum’s four 3D printers can print thirteen clips at a time, with each set taking five hours to complete.
Museums are also leveraging their roles as knowledge-sharers and conveners to assist medical professionals and help the public maintain their personal safety:
Arizona Science Center (Phoenix) shared tips for how those at home can make face masks for personal use.
The Children’s Museum of the Arts (New York, NY) posted a blog sharing instructions on how to create personal fabric face masks using simple sewing skills.
KidZone Museum (Truckee, CA) launched That’s Sew Tahoe, a mask-making project for local hospitals. Under guidance from their community partners, the museum is coordinating with local sewers and makers to collect cloth masks. While not as effective as medical-grade masks, cloth masks allow hospitals to preserve essential PPE for high-risk situations.
Even with their doors closed, museums are working to serve their communities. For more information about what museums are doing in this time, check out ACM’s recent blog post Conversations with Children’s Museums Leaders around COVID-19, our list of Children’s Museum Virtual Activities, and ASTC’s blog and COVID-19 resource section.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) works toward its vision of increased understanding of—and engagement with—science and technology among all people. Follow ASTC on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) held a series of three hour-long CEO Calls, sponsored by Blackbaud, on March 24, 25, and 26, 2020. These calls provided a space for ACM to connect with children’s museum executive leadership—and for leaders to connect with each other—in the aftermath of mass closures in our field due to COVID-19.
ACM research shows that all U.S. children’s museums, and most around the world, are currently closed. We started each call with a short update from ACM on U.S. federal advocacy efforts to support museums and nonprofits. For up-to-date information about ACM’s advocacy work, and current relief opportunities available to children’s museums, see ACM’s website.
The majority of each call was spent around CEO discussion of two broad topics: museum staffing and operations decisions in the coming weeks, as well as efforts to virtually engage with audiences. A through line throughout these conversations was the challenges children’s museums will face—and what our field may look like—when they are able to reopen.
When making staffing decisions, CEOs took into account their museum’s reserves, insurance, relief opportunities, and unemployment options (which vary state by state). All children’s museums are nonprofits, and most are lean organizations with limited reserves that rely on admissions to cover operational costs. Based on an analysis of the 34 museums that shared information about their staffing decisions during these calls, 32 percent reported furloughing staff and 26 percent reported laying off staff.
Some CEOs were advised to lay off workers so they could collect unemployment, rather than slowly reduce their hours over time. Museums also considered staffing decisions with their museum’s business interruption insurance in mind. (See CEO discussion on business interruption insurance on Groupsite here).
CEOs shared their staffing plans over the next few months. These staffing plans fell into a few broad categories:
CEOs suggested additional strategies to mitigate costs, such as letting full-time staff use all vacation and sick leave and freezing 403B contributions.
Furloughs and layoffs were the most common options for reducing payrolls. CEOs discussed the many considerations that went into their decisions to furlough or layoff staff.
CEOs also discussed their communications with major funders over the past few weeks.
CEOs also discussed the work their museums are doing to bring the museum experience online, with virtual activities, often retaining staff to create this virtual programming. Content is often designed to keep the museum’s community engaged. It focuses on repurposed museum activities families can do at home, such as experiments, physical activities, storytimes, and more. (ACM is tracking these virtual activities—see our ongoing list here).
CEOs shared other virtual content ideas.
CEOs shared positive results so far.
CEOs noted a need for support around a few areas related to virtual activities, as well as posed questions for consideration.
As most virtual activities are offered free of charge, CEOs discussed different creative money-makers they can explore related to their current efforts.
CEOs also discussed some of their museum’s offline activities.
ACM will draw from the conversations of the first CEO Calls as we continue to identify opportunities for museum leaders, and all children’s museum professionals, to convene and share knowledge. Stay tuned for more information!
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Are you a children’s museum with online programming? Contact Alison.Howard@ChildrensMuseums.org. Follow and share museums’ virtual activities with the hashtag #ChildrensMuseumsatHome.
Last updated: April 21, 2020. Follow and share children’s museums’ virtual activities on social media with the hashtag #ChildrensMuseumsatHome.
As of March 19, 2020, ACM research shows that most children’s around the world, including every children’s museum in the U.S., has temporarily closed due to COVID-19. Throughout these incredibly challenging times, children’s museums around the world are continuing to fulfill their missions to promote playful learning—by supporting families at home. Museum staff are facilitating interactive activities via YouTube and Facebook Live. They’re sharing educational resources for caregivers suddenly teaching young kids at home while schools are closed. And they’re providing daily sources of joy and inspiration in this time of stress.
Check out this list of virtual activities offered by children’s museums, which we will continue to update regularly!
Above & Beyond Children’s Museum (Sheboygan, WI)
Posting daily videos of music programs and storytimes. Posting at-home activities, crafts, and project ideas using common household items on social media.
Check out “ABCM First Steps in Music for ages 0-2”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | #ABCMactivities
Adventure! Children’s Museum (Eugene, OR)
Sharing daily Adventure! Museum @ Home posts via Facebook and their email newsletter.
Check out “Museum @ Home – Issue 10”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Amazement Square (Lynchburg, VA)
Sharing daily videos through Amazement Square, Anywhere.
Check out “Try-It Tuesday with Officer Ramirez (Making Play-Dough)“
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Amelia Park Children’s Museum (Westfield, MA)
Launched their “Bridging the Gap” series, with new activities posted to their Facebook page and website daily.
Check out “A Cloud in a Jar”
Website | Facebook
Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum and Leslie Science & Nature Center (MI)
Kicked off their online programming with “Virtual Spring Break Camp,” with a series of STEM, environmental education, and camp-style activity videos, plus live workshops.
Check out “How to Practice Social Distancing”
Website – AAHOM | Website – LSNC | Facebook – AAHOM | Facebook – LSNC
Bay Area Discovery Museum (San Francisco, CA)
Launched “Bringing BADM to You,” including a newsletter with research-backed activities and tips for parents and caregivers. Each week is organized around one of three themes: Math & Science, Body & Brain, and Talk & Play, including a weekly live event.
Check out “Raft Design”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Betty Brinn Children’s Museum (Milwaukee, WI)
Offering “Play in the Cloud,” a collection of online resources, including daily tips for hands-on, educational activities. Facilitating weekly online meetups for caregivers of preschoolers via Zoom. Introducing an online version of its Tot Time program.
Check out “Inspire Daily: Paperclip Sculptures”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Boston Children’s Museum (MA)
Offering a wealth of free learning resources on their website. Sharing resources and activities on social media!
Check out “100 Ways to Play”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Bucks County Children’s Museum (New Hope, PA)
Sharing activities and online educational resources on their website.
Check out the “Think Spring at Home Mural” coloring page
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Building for Kids Children’s Museum (Appleton, WI)
Posting daily activities every weekday at 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. CST, including movement exercises and musical performances.
Check out “Afternoon Activity: Baby Bath Time”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Creativity Museum (San Francisco, CA)
Updating their blog and social media with resources and safety tips for families at home
Check out “Mystery Box Challenge: Create A Zoo Animal”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #CreativityEveryday #CreativityKids
Children’s Discovery Museum (Normal, IL)
Posting a “Daily Dose of Play,” with playful activities for families for e-learning days.
Check out “Spaghetti Kitchen Sensory Bin”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #DailyDoseofPlay
Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose (CA)
Launched Virtual Purple Museum, sharing live and recorded broadcasts around science, math, the arts, storytime, and baby rhyme time, as well as activity sheets.
Check out “Treasure Maps”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Hands-On Museum of Tuscaloosa (AL)
Launched CHOM at Home, with themed daily programming: Movement Mondays, Time Travel Tuesdays, Wacky Science Wednesday, Theatric Thursday, Friday Fun, and Weekend Challenge.
Check out “Theatric Thursday – Hand Masks!”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine (Portland)
Offering daily online “At Home Together: Wild Life and Makerspace Series,” “Maine Youth Playwriting Challenge,” and “Onstage and Off: Theatre Together (Online) Series.”
Check out “Beachwalk Scavenger”
Website | Facebook | Instagram
The Children’s Museum in Easton (MA)
Posting a daily #socialdistancelearning challenge on Facebook, with a video of a staff member demonstrating the activity.
Check out “Hands, Feet, Oh My! (Introduction to Measuring)”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #socialdistancelearning
Children’s Museum of Atlanta (GA)
Posting an activity, vocab list, and music playlist or book recommendation each weekday at 11 a.m. EDT on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Check out “Music Monday: Bean Tambourine”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #CMAatHome
The Children’s Museum of Cleveland (OH)
Posting daily online programming on social media, with movement exercises, storytimes, music and STEM lessons, and more. Sharing additional activities and video archives on their website.
Check out “Movement – DIY Laser Maze”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of Denver at Marsico Campus (CO)
Launched the “Museum Fun 101” Facebook group for sharing at-home activities from the museum. Also offering resources on their website.
Check out “Teaching Kitchen Recipes”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
The Children’s Museum of Evansville (IN)
Delivering dynamic programming to children and their families, with educational content, playful Quack Pack tutorials, and more!
Check out “Build a Blanket Fort”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac (WI)
Sharing educational and supporting videos for both children and their grownups.
Check out “Maker Lab – Corner Bookmarks”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube
The Children’s Museum of Green Bay (WI)
Offering daily videos every morning at 10:15 a.m. CDT with live and pre-recorded programming.
Check out “Getting Messy with Salt Dough”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of Houston (TX)
Producing a series of videos related to COVID-19 featuring “Mr. O,” in partnership with ACM. Providing resources on their website and social media channels.
Check out “It’s Snot Funny”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of La Crosse (WI)
Sharing suggestions for at-home activities, adapting museum programming for kids at home.
Check out “Wee Move – Wiggle & Giggle”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #SillySmart
Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry (Charleston, SC)
Sharing videos with instructional, at-home activities for young children and families. Sharing mindfulness resources. Letting their mascot, DooDash the Dragon, take over Twitter and Instagram!
Check out “Brown Bag STEM Challenge with Mr. Kevin”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of Manhattan (NY)
Launched CMOM at Home, with daily videos, sing-a-longs, games, and more. Also sharing educational resources for families.
Check out “Magic Monday: Fizzy Hidden Surprise”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (Dover)
Bringing families and educators resources, with STEAM, storytime, and other activity videos, community connections, and activity boxes.
Check out “First Friends Rhymes & Songs”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #PlayTogether
Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh (PA)
Launched Museum at Home to bring maker activities from the museum and MuseumLab home. Posting creative do-it-yourself projects every day!
Check out “Let’s Try Making Our Own Watercolor Paints”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of Phoenix (AZ)
Sharing daily virtual activity videos on social media, with themes from Movement Monday to Arty Party Friday to Storybook Sunday!
Check out “Water Bottle Bowling”
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Children’s Museum of Richmond (VA)
Launched a blog to share videos, activities (including art projects and storytimes), and caregiver resources.
Check out “Ten Tips for Helping Kids Play Ahead”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Children’s Museum of Sonoma County (CA)
Sharing resources and at-home activity ideas. Creating how-to videos on YouTube and live programming videos on Facebook Live. Sharing content in their blog and newsletter.
Check out “Balloon Blow-Up Science Experiment”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Children’s Museum of South Dakota (Brookings)
Posting “Recipes for Play” on their Seize the Play blog, sharing how to make family trees, puffy paint, prairie beads, and more.
Check out “Process Art with Lauren and Charles”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #PlayAlongSD
Children’s Museum of Southern Minnesota (Mankato)
Launched #CMSMatHome, with daily activities for families and children to complete at home.
Check out “Be a City Planner”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #CMSMatHome
The Children’s Museum of Wilmington (NC)
Designing creative activities for families to do at home, with brain games, exercises, and more.
Check out “ABC Exercise Cards”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | #atCMOW
The Children’s Playhouse (Boone, NC)
Sharing short versions of their popular music classes, “Musical Adventures with Miss Laura,” on their website and social media.
Check out “Weather Songs”
Website | Facebook | YouTube
Children’s Science Center (Fairfax, VA)
Creating experiential videos including demonstrations, DIY experiments, keeper talks, and their Budding Bookworm program. Also continuing to care for the 100 animals that live at the Children’s Science Center Lab!
Check out “Baby Elephant Toothpaste”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
C’mon (Golisano Children’s Museum of Naples) (FL)
Offering Play & Learn online programs, such as Little Learners Storytime, STEAM, and C’mon at Home, on social media and Facebook live.
Check out “Little Learners Storytime – La Oruga Muy Hambrienta (The Very Hungry Caterpillar)”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | #cmoncares
Creative Discovery Museum (Chattanooga, TN)
Launched Creativity TV, sharing lessons from the museum, including critter encounters and science shows, as well as activities that can be done with materials found in the home.
Check out “Great Balls of Fire – Fiery Lycopodium Powder Experiment!”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Delaware Children’s Museum
Sharing fun activities and recipes that adults and kids can safely and easily do at home to continue to learn and play together.
Check out “DIY Ping Pong Mazes”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Discovery Center Museum (Rockford, IL)
Launched #PlayfulLearningatHome, sharing daily videos with instructional, at-home science activities and demonstrations, art projects, storytimes and sing-alongs, weekly “Ask a Scientist” Facebook Live Streams, and the humorous misadventures of Captain Discovery Center.
Check out “Make Your Own Fizzy Colors”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | #PlayfulLearningatHome
Discovery Children’s Museum (Las Vegas, NV)
Sharing resources and educational links for families figuring out how to entertain and educate kids at home.
Check out “How Does Static Electricity Work?”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #AtHomeDiscoveries
Discovery Museum (Acton, MA)
Launched Discovery at Home, an online resource guide with hands-on learning activities and curated resources.
Check out “Tracing Shadows”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Discovery Place Kids (Huntersville and Rockingham, NC)
Created Stay-at-Home Science, a digital learning center with experiments, projects, activities, and more resources to keep learners of all ages engaged.
Check out “A Livestream from our Rainforest”
Website | Facebook – Discovery Place Kids-Huntersville | Facebook – Discovery Place Kids-Rockingham | Twitter – Discovery Place Kids-Huntersville | Twitter – Discovery Place Kids-Rockingham | Instagram
The DoSeum (San Antonio, TX)
Created “Do It At Home,” an online hub with educational resources for families at home, including DIY Activities, Storytimes, and Questions from Kids.
Check out “Ask a DOer: Meet Dr. Richard”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Duluth Children’s Museum (MN)
Launched “Stay@Home, Play@Home,” with new videos every day!
Check out “Learning to Juggle”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Dupage Children’s Museum (Naperville, IL)
Build a robust online community to support families, with new programming and experiences to keep the learning growing at home.
Check out “Sensory Snow”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Explore More Discovery Museum (Harrison, VA)
Offering “Explore More at Home” activities five days a week. Each day explores a different theme through play-based, interactive experiences that families can easily do at home.
Check out “Explore More at Home: Pet Party”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Explore & More – The Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Children’s Museum (Buffalo, NY)
Launched their “Sanity Savers” blog—an at-home guide for bringing play-based education into the home.
Check out “Sanity Savers: Nursing Home Mail”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Flint Children’s Museum (MI)
Taking the museum’s program to a virtual setting, with a focus on projects families can do together with things found around the house.
Check out “Rainbow Kaleidoscope”
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Glazer Children’s Museum (Tampa, FL)
Launched “GCM at Home” to share virtual content with families.
Check out “Wiggle a Little, a playlist”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #GCMatHome
Grand Rapids Children’s Museum (MI)
Creating Play@Home content to help families engage in open-ended play at home—“so they can transform their living room, backyard, or bedroom into their very own mini-GRCM.”
Check out “Try-It Tuesday: Upcycled Crayons”
Website | Facebook | Instagram
Great Explorations Children’s Museum (St. Petersburg, FL)
Posting a weekly challenge each Monday, sharing community resources, creating videos, and offering “Blow Off Some S.T.E.A.M.” kits by mail.
Check out “Morris Scavenger Hunt”
Website | Facebook | Instagram
Greensboro Children’s Museum (NC)
Launched “explore (at home),” with educational resources and activities to bring the joy of meaningful play into families’ homes.
Check out “Violet Jelly Recipe”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Hawaii Children’s Discovery Center (Honolulu)
Launched an At Home Learning video series, with storytimes, STEAM activities, and yoga.
Check out “Yoga for Kids”
Website | Facebook | YouTube
HealthWorks! North Mississippi (Tupelo)
Sharing virtual lessons and at-home resources such as family-friendly healthy activities, exercises, and assignments.
Check out “Health Works! At Home – Healthy Mindset”
Website | Facebook
Imagine Children’s Museum (Everett, WA)
Conducting video programming, as well as facilitating virtual activities like a drawing contest and pen pal exchange with the museum.
Check out “How to Build a Hoop Glider”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | #AtHomeDiscoveries
Imagine Nation, A Museum Early Learning Center (Bristol, CT)
Launched Imagine Nation At Home, a new online community, sharing links, activities, and messages that promote positivity, fun, and learning through play.
Check out “Recycled Material Fun #1: Simple Bird Feeder”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #ImagineNationAtHome
Imaginosity – Dublin Children’s Museum (Ireland)
Sharing daily activities on social media, with full instructions on Instagram Stories.
Check out “DIY Fossil Excavation”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Interactive Neighborhood for Kids, Inc. (INK) (Gainesville, GA)
Offering daily play prompts and craft ideas.
Check out “At-Home Play Challenge – Young Chef”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
The Iowa Children’s Museum (Coralville)
Posting a variety of at-home activities, creative prompts, and interactive livestream events (like sing-alongs on Instagram).
Check out “Games from around the World”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Jackson Hole Children’s Museum (Jackson, WY)
Offering a Jackson Hole ONLINE Play Museum, with virtual programming including science and art activities, sensory and song-filled Toddler Time activities, and weekly events like family yoga and virtual Touch-A-Truck tours!
Check out “Rain Cloud in a Jar! Wacky Wednesday Science with Anna”
Website | Facebook | YouTube
Kaleideum (Winston-Salem, NC)
Posting daily videos of content around parenting, arts & crafts, and science learning families can do at home on their social media, blog, and website.
Check out “Meet Huey, Our Blue and Gold Macaw”
Website | Facebook – Kaleideum Downtown | Facebook – Kaleideum North | Twitter – Kaleideum Downtown | Twitter – Kaleideum North | Instagram | YouTube | #kaleideumathome
Kansas Children’s Discovery Center (Topeka)
Producing a series of educational content pieces designed to get families playing and learning at home.
Check out “Pretend Vet Clinic”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | #DiscoveryatHome
Kentucky Science Center (Louisville, KY)
Collaborates with other organizations in Kentucky on My Big Little Adventure, an early childhood-focused home resource funded by PNC Grow Up Great. Also posting science experiments on social media!
Check out “Paper Helicopter Plans”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | #DoScience
Kidspace Children’s Museum (Pasadena, CA)
Launched Kidspace-At-Home: Virtual Learning and Play Resources, developed to spark connection, creativity, laughter, and inspiration.
Check out “Birthdays During Social Distancing”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
KidsQuest Children’s Museum (Bellevue, WA)
Sharing ways to play and learn at home on their website and social media.
Check out “Early Math Skills: Sorting and Classifying”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Kidzu Children’s Museum (Chapel Hill, NC)
Regularly posting new activities for families on their website and Facebook along with sharing links to additional resources for playful learning at home.
Check out “Messy Morning: Fun with Baking Soda and Vinegar”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Kohl Children’s Museum of Greater Chicago (Glenview, IL)
Adding videos to their Home Zone series, with activities to help families take the museum experience home, plus their Story Time series!
Check out “Mathematizing Weather”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Lincoln Children’s Museum (NE)
Providing meaningful fun through both online and in-home activities, like a daily Boredom Busters Facebook Live event at 10:30 a.m. CDT (with accompanying resources) and curbside pickup activities.
Check out “Boredom Buster: Earth, Paint, and Rocks”
Website | Facebook | Twitter
Long Island Children’s Museum (Garden City, NY)
Has online resource guides for playing outside safely and talking about art. They’re also sharing resources on Facebook, and hosting a “Visit LICM at Home” event on March 28, 2020.
Check out “Bookface Friday”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Louisiana Children’s Museum (New Orleans)
Launched “In Dialogue,” a weekly series on Zoom and YouTube featuring experts from the Tulane Institute of Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health.
Check out “In Dialogue: Positive Parenting”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Madison Children’s Museum (WI)
Sharing educational programming for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers, along with quick activity ideas, tips, news from the museum, and partner resources. Also launched a Facebook group for museum members and friends.
Check out “Brain Builders with Heather: Indoor Obstacle Course”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Marbles Kids Museum (Raleigh, NC)
Providing a daily dose of play on YouTube and social media, as well as posting Play Tools and resources on their website.
Check out “Kitchen Percussion”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #dailydoseofplay
Minnesota Children’s Museum (St. Paul)
Sharing super ways to play at home, with open-ended play activities, play tips, videos, plus blog posts and other resources.
Check out “Coloring Pages from a Local Artist”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Mississippi Children’s Museum (Jackson)
Launched MCM at Home on all digital platforms, with hands-on educational videos, book readings, individual activities, and activity kits.
Check out “Farm Bureau Spotlight: Honey Bees”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #MCMatHome
Museo Tin Marín (San Salvador, El Salvador)
Posting videos, activities, and custom graphics sharing educational resources and activities.
Check out the correct way to wash your hands
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Museum of Discovery and Science (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Launched MODS Virtual Camp Discovery across all digital platforms, with a new science-focused demo or activity posted each weekday.
Check out “Ooey Gooey Chocolate Slime”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
MOXI, The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation (Santa Barbara, CA)
Launched Moxi at Home to share daily activities for families at home, drawing from the museum’s popular programming and exhibits.
Check out “Toddler Tuesday: Mystery Shakers”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #moxiathome
MUZEIKO – America for Bulgaria Children’s Museum (Sofia, Bulgaria)
Sharing online resources and livestreams to stay in touch with visitors and friends, including activities and storytimes.
Check out “Crawling Exhibits at Muzeiko”
Website | Facebook | YouTube
National Children’s Museum (Washington, DC)
Going live on Facebook each day at 2:30 p.m. EDT to share activities, including science experiments, storytimes, and Design Build Challenges.
Check out “#STEAMwork Climate Action Challenge”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #STEAMwork
The New Children’s Museum (San Diego, CA)
Launched #thinkplaycreateathome, encouraging visitors, members, and staff to send short videos or photos of how they are being creative at home!
Check out “DIY Scramble Screens”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #thinkplaycreateathome
North Country Children’s Museum (Potsdam, NY)
Created a YouTube channel to post STEAM project videos!
Check out “DIY Balloon”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Omaha Children’s Museum (NE)
Sharing daily “Museum Minutes” and “Playful Projects” videos, including storytimes, at-home science experiments, and Tinker Challenges. Also offering free printables on their website.
Check out “Ben’s Tinker Challenge: Will It Float?”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum (IL)
Offering video-based StoryTime and Career Days, inviting children from around the world to contribute to the PlayHouse Times, and a Summer Maker Challenge supported by other ideas for art and making projects around the home. Also offering resources related to parenting through this difficult moment.
Check out “Summer Maker Program Bingo Card”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Port Discovery Children’s Museum (Baltimore, MD)
Sharing At Home Play Tips, with activity ideas, resources, and updates from the museum.
Check out “Kinetic Sand Play Bin.”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Pretend City Children’s Museum (Irvine, CA)
Offering daily story times as well as real-time programming through Zoom and Facebook Live.
Check out “Brown Bear Activity”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Providence Children’s Museum (RI)
Moved all museum programming online, posting daily videos on Facebook as well as at-home activities.
Check out “Make It Rain with DIY Rainsticks”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube | #PCMCreates
Sciencenter (Ithaca, NY)
Hosting daily live activities at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Zoom, which are also shared on Facebook. Also sharing a live YouTube feed of their Animal Room!
Check out “Paper Mountains”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Scott Family Amazeum (Bentonville, AK)
Launched Amazeum YOU to share activities and stay in touch with families at home, including twice-daily check-ins via Facebook Live.
Check out “Plushie Pillow”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | #AmazeumYOU
Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum (Winchester, VA)
Sharing themed activities six days a week, around subjects like chain reactions and the five senses.
Check out “Five Senses Detective”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
Stepping Stones Museum for Children (Norwalk, CT)
Encouraging playful learning at home with their “Every Day Fun! DIY Home Extension” video series, featuring Fitness Fun, Music Makers, Science Central, and more!
Check out “Music Makers | Wash Your Hands!“
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | #SteppingStonesAtHome #BooZoosBookBuddies
Staten Island Children’s Museum (NY)
Created “At Home with SICM” a constantly updated collection educational and inspiring videos, print-at-home activity sheets, and live-stream sessions. Topics include arts and crafts, the museum’s exhibits and animal collection, dance and play circles, and storytime.
Check out “Morse Code Explained“
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
The Strong (Rochester, NY)
Sharing DIY activities, imaginative play ideas, and videos that include storytimes, animal showings, and fun facts about toys.
Check out “Stories About the Stuff—Mr. Potato Head”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube
Thinkery (Austin, TX)
Producing a “Thinkery At Home” video series, featuring smart, fun things to do with kids at home.
Check out “10 Great Hands-On Activities To Do At Home”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube | #ThinkeryAtHome
Treehouse Children’s Museum (Ogden, UT)
Sharing online activities in partnership with authors, illustrators, puppeteers, storytellers, and filmmakers who have previously served residencies at the museum. Running “Children’s Challenges” competitions, with submissions reviewed by weekly guest artists. Also creating music videos with staff.
Check out “Treehouse Tales 1: Storyteller Randel McGee”
Website | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City (Shawnee, KS)
Providing virtual programming twice a day, Tuesday to Friday, as well as sharing “pop-up” activities on YouTube.
Check out “The Three Little Pigs – Puppet Show”
Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | YouTube
The Woodlands Children’s Museum (TX)
Sharing Storybook Theatre and Puppet Theatre videos with their Literacy Specialist, Miss Jan, on Thursdays and Fridays at 11 a.m. CST.
Check out “Shadow Puppet Theatre-When Spring Comes”
Website | Facebook | Twitter
WOW! Children’s Museum (Lafayette, CO)
Offering “WOW! @ Home” activity guides and recipes on their website! Posting activities and storytimes on Facebook.
Check out “Forest of Light at Home”
Website | Facebook | Instagram
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Follow and share museums’ virtual activities with the hashtag #ChildrensMuseumsatHome.
By Elissa K. Miller
As a result of the COVID-19 crisis, children’s museums, science-technology centers, and other cultural and educational attractions are facing unprecedented challenges in every aspect of operations. After your team meets the most urgent physical safety requirements and addresses other urgent matters, you’ll need to determine how to move forward during a period of extremely limited or altogether ceased operations.
One of the many challenges facing museums is how to handle cancellations of scheduled events, birthday parties, and group visits. In this post, we’ll look at some different options for handling large numbers of cancellations.
Your payment processor is the company that handles credit card, debit card, gift card and e-check transactions. Some registration systems require to you use their payment processor while others allow you to choose the organization you want to work with.
As part of fraud prevention, most payment processors place a limit on the dollar amount of refunds that can be issued in a day. While this limit is usually more than reasonable in normal circumstances, you might reach the limit quickly if you plan to refund a significant number of registrations.
When you know the daily refund limit, you can plan the number of refunds accordingly. So, be sure to check with your payment processor before you start issuing refunds; depending on the answer, you may want to ask them to temporarily raise the daily limit so you can process refunds more quickly.
Your visitors and members appreciate your programs and understand your value to the community, and chances are good that many of them want to support your mission, especially during COVID-19. Instead of automatically issuing refunds for canceled events, ask your customers to consider the following options.
By converting registration and reservation fees to gift cards delivers the best of both worlds to your customers and your museum. Gift cards will bring families back to your doors as soon as it’s safe, and can be spent on admission, memberships, another camp or program, another birthday party and even merchandise (depending on how your museum store operates).
Your customers don’t lose any money because the gift card covers the value of their payments, and your museum can keep the money on your books to support your operations during this uncertain time.
As an added incentive and thank you, consider rounding up the value of the gift cards or adding an additional flat dollar amount to make customers even more positive toward your organization.
If your museum doesn’t offer gift cards or you don’t have a practical way to offer them, or if you simply want to boost memberships, you can offer to apply registration fees to one or more kinds of memberships. As with gift cards, consider rounding up the value as a thank you to your new members.
For customers who paid more than the cost of a membership, you’ll still need to consider issuing a refund or gift card, or asking if they’d like to convert the balance to a donation, discussed in the next section.
Speaking of memberships, you may want to consider extending the expiration dates of all memberships to account for the time that your museum is closed.
Many organizations are asking registration owners if they’d like to convert all or part of their registration fees for canceled events to a donation instead. Depending on your museum, donations may be used as unrestricted funds to support your continued operations without the quid pro quo of a membership or gift card.
The procedure for cancelling events depends entirely on your event management provider, so some of these suggestions may not be available to you.
Elissa K. Miller, M.Ed., is communications director at Doubleknot, an integrated online, on-site, and mobile solutions provider for nonprofits and cultural organizations. As the former development director for a regional nonprofit, she’s passionate about helping nonprofits and youth-serving organizations harness new technologies to streamline operations and support their missions.
Check out our updated COVID-19 Resources on the ACM website (Updated March 26, 2020) .
In recognition of the global response to the coronavirus (COVID-19), the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) recommends the following actions to children’s museums to guide their rapid response to this developing situation.
Your museum has strong existing practices around cleaning and safety protocols, as well as other procedures that keep your museum in top shape during cold and flu season. Given the public response and concern around COVID-19, we encourage our members to review their existing practices, as well as consider potential new processes to help your institution remain responsive as public spaces—and public resources.
These recommendations are not intended to provide a definitive answer for your museum, but can be used as a starting point for discussion at your museum’s leadership or board level.
See the Safety & Risk Management section of ACM’s Online Member Resource Library for examples of cleaning and safety protocols.
These recommendations draw from best practices for all communicable diseases. As local destinations, children’s museums are well versed in many of these practices and protocols. Part of what makes COVID-19 scary is that it’s new—but our field has tested practices that work to keep kids safe while playfully learning. By reviewing and updating our existing practices, and leveraging our roles as trusted resources, children’s museums can remain responsive in service to our communities.
These resources will be updated as new information becomes available.
ACM Groupsite is the Association of Children’s Museums’ central hub online. It’s a space where children’s museums professionals can ask for advice, share ideas, and access resources on our discussion boards. Log in or create an account.
Discussion Posts on ACM Groupsite
Resources in the Online Member Resource Library
World Health Organization: https://www.who.int/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: https://www.cdc.gov/
Environmental Protection Agency:
Directory of Local Health Departments (U.S.): https://www.naccho.org/membership/lhd-directory
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
There are more than 300 children’s museums in the world serving millions of families, but each one is unique. We know that children’s museums are joyful spaces for learning and play, but they are much more than just places to visit. In fact, all children’s museums—regardless of size —function as local destinations (with designed spaces, like their exhibits), educational laboratories (with programming for children and families), and act as community resources and advocates for children.
There’s so much to love about children’s museums everywhere. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we asked children’s museum staff: What do you love about your children’s museum? Here are some of their answers!
“I love that we are a safe place for kids to learn and grow through self-guided play. They get to experience different careers and practice the examples they see in our homes and community in our different exhibits. I love that I get to use my formal education background to help the kids learn in an informal setting… without even knowing they are learning new things!”
-Erica Bickhart, Children’s Museum of Findlay (OH)
“I love working for a children’s museum because every day welcomes a new adventure! Whether it’s leading one of our fun educational classes or dressing up as a princess for an event, no day is ever the same.”
-Allison Armstrong, Sacramento Children’s Museum (CA)
“Sacramento Children’s Museum is a great place for young guests to grow, learn, and explore! Our programs and classes are so much fun. Our Van-Go mobile museum is a great way to reach out to the community when it’s hard for them to come to us. We play, we inspire, and we reach out.”
-Denver Vaughn, Sacramento Children’s Museum (CA)
“I love how embedded our museum is within our downtown community. When there are events in our town we are right in the middle of it. We have built longstanding relationships with the other downtown businesses.”
-Gracie Chaffin, Louisiana Children’s Discovery Center (Hammond)
“I love watching kids be able to play and learn and have a safe place to come to! I love our nature room—and one thing we just added to it is a tower garden. We always wanted to have plants, and this is so easy and kids love to see the veggies growing each week!”
-Robin Kussmann, Playzeum Yuba Sutter (Yuba City, CA)
LOVE seeing families playing together. Less heads down with phones and more heads up for play!
-Mandy Volpe, Interactive Neighborhood for Kids, Inc. (Gainesville, GA)
“We love that we are the first children’s museum in the state of Mississippi located one block from the Gulf of Mexico in the renovated Mississippi City Elementary School, constructed in 1915 and an architectural exhibition itself. Lynn Meadows Discovery Center offers 15,000 square feet of indoor hands-on exhibit space, seven and a half acres of outdoor play space, a spacious theatre, Viking kitchen and other great facilities for children, families and community use. Just like the children who enter our doors, Lynn Meadows Discovery Center is continually growing and improving, expanding and changing our exhibits, adding and enhancing our offerings and constantly learning along the way!”
-Sonja Gillis, Lynn Meadows Discovery Center (Gulfport, MS)
There are so many things to love about Cheshire Children’s Museum! One special thing we do is recognize early childhood educators in our region. Each year, we celebrate all early childhood educators at an event at the museum, culminating in naming one Early Childhood Educator of the Year! He/she is selected by a panel of judges ahead of time after reviewing nominations from colleagues, directors, and family members of children they serve. We have donated prizes for the winner and door prizes. This year we will have a proclamation from our mayor.
-Deb Ganley, Cheshire Children’s Museum (Keene, NH)
“There is so much to love. On the amusing side—I really love how kids dress for PLAY.”
-Sharon Stone Smith, Sacramento Children’s Museum (CA)
What do you love about your children’s museum?
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Top photo courtesy of Lynn Meadows Discovery Center.
By David Robinson
The fifteenth annual Endangered Species Day on May 15, 2020 provides children’s museums with an opportunity to highlight their educational/other programs while also recognizing this nationwide celebration.
First approved by the U.S. Senate in 2006, the purpose of Endangered Species Day is to expand awareness of the importance of endangered species/habitat conservation and to share success stories of species recovery. Every year, Endangered Species Day events are held at museums, schools, zoos, aquariums, botanic gardens, conservation groups, parks, wildlife refuges and other locations throughout the country.
Here are a few ideas for Endangered Species Day activities:
Activities can be held on May 15, that weekend, or earlier in the month.
To help you plan for an event, the Endangered Species Day website features a variety of resources, including:
In addition to your own promotion in local media outlets, we can help promote your activity on the Endangered Species Day Event Directory. People in your community will visit the website directory to find a nearby event. Register it yourself or send the information to David Robinson, Endangered Species Day Director: drobinson@endangered.org.
A project of the Endangered Species Coalition, Endangered Species Day is also supported by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), along with numerous education and conservation organizations, including the American Library Association, North American Association for Environmental Education, National Association of Biology Teachers, Association of Zoos and Aquariums, National Audubon Society, Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, Jane Goodall Institute, National Garden Clubs, Sierra Club, the National Science Teachers Association, San Diego Zoo, Earth Day Network, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife.
David Robinson is Endangered Species Day Director at Endangered Species Coalition. Learn more at www.endangeredspeciesday.org.
The following post appears in the latest issue of Hand to Hand, ACM’s quarterly journal.
By Rebecca Shulman Herz and Kristin Vannatta
About a year ago, I spoke to Janice O’Donnell, former director of Providence Children’s Museum, about training floor staff. Janice shared an experience she had at the InterActivity conference years ago: during a rare moment of quiet on a bus to an evening event, Janice shouted, “Floor staff!” All of a sudden the bus was abuzz, everyone talking about the challenges of hiring, working with, and retaining the team of part-time, entry-level staff who may be the only museum staff members most visitors ever meet.
What can a children’s museum do in order to have floor staff who are knowledgeable, engaged, and invested in the museum? For years I thought of this as a retention challenge: When you find wonderful staff, and their jobs are part-time and underpaid, how do you retain them for more than a year? But now I think of this as a cultural question. How do you create a museum culture in which these valuable staff members are engaged and invested? When there is turnover, how can new staff members quickly become a part of this culture?
Kevin Kruse, founder & CEO of LEADx, an online learning platform that provides free leadership development, has noted that employee engagement is not synonymous with happiness or satisfaction. Rather, it is “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organization and its goals. This emotional commitment means engaged employees actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.” According to Kruse, engagement is driven by strong communication, opportunities for job growth, recognition, and trust.
When we think about bringing on new staff, we often focus on training: what do they need to know to do their job? In part this is practical—staff need training in order to have the necessary tools and knowledge to admit visitors to the museum, clean toys and exhibits, or sell memberships. It is also efficient, and most museums have developed formal or informal training modules that can be easily repeated when new staff come on board.
While cleaning is critical, it does not lead to an emotional commitment to the museum. It is not why we do what we do. Megan Dickerson, senior manager of exhibitions at the New Children’s Museum, describes the dichotomy between training staff to clean and engaging staff in the museum’s mission as “efficiency vs value.” We often prioritize teaching staff practical skills, like cleaning and resetting, because we know how to do this efficiently. Engaging families in playful learning is of critical value, but we cannot necessarily train efficiently for this. Engagement is individual and emotional; it is not essential for staff to operate the museum at its most basic level, but it is essential in creating a museum that offers visitors and the community a wonderful experience and true value. How do we deeply engage part-time floor staff in our missions, in the importance of the work we—and they—do?
There are as many ways to engage staff as there are organizations. The Peoria Play-House Children’s Museum went through three phases in its experience pursuing staff engagement. The first phase was a grant-driven experiment limited to one of our exhibits; the second was an expansion to all staff. The third, which we are still in the middle of, is an exploration of how far can we push it: what can an engaged floor staff contribute to the museum’s programming and exhibits, and how collaborative can we truly be?
In 2017, the PlayHouse was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to improve Real Tools, our makerspace. We worked with our evaluation partner, the University of Illinois, to think about what visitors were learning. Time and time again, we returned to the importance of staff in the space, both as facilitators and as experts in the visitor experience. With this in mind, Adrienne Huffman, the PlayHouse’s education coordinator, held monthly meetings during which staff visited children’s makerspaces around the region, read articles, discussed successes and challenges, and identified prototype solutions to these challenges, all rooted in staff experience and informed by readings. Rather than telling staff how to do their jobs, Adrienne developed a space in which staff told us and each other how to do their jobs and improve the exhibit.
On the one hand, this sounds obvious. On the other, most of us know firsthand this is not how many organizations work, or how entry-level part-time staff are often treated. It captures three of the four drivers of engagement Kruse identifies: strong communication (bolstered by monthly meetings), recognition (asking staff to share best practices, and acknowledging they are experts in their work), and trust (allowing staff to drive changes in the Real Tools exhibit).
The results of these monthly meetings exceeded expectations. Because staff were able to prototype different solutions quickly, this exhibit continues to change and improve. Visitors comment on how much they enjoy some of the new solutions, including, for example, information posted on the walls, changes to exhibit signage, and the transformation of individual work stations into a collaborative work table.
Staff began to take ownership of the space in new ways. One staff member, Haley, noted that children often looked at the finished projects on the walls, and wanted to copy what other children had done. She decided to experiment with what we hung on the walls, taking down the finished projects and replacing them with materials samples that could inspire kids. Haley described this as akin to looking at clouds and seeing forms—what can a piece of foam become? An egg carton? Collectively, staff also designed a new drop-in maker program offered monthly on a weekend morning, each dedicated to a specific tool or practice. The first three focused on bookmaking, embroidery, and wood burning.
These weekly meetings were successful in truly engaging Real Tools staff, and improving their work with visitors. It did not stop staff from leaving. We still had staff who graduated, or were hired for full time jobs elsewhere, or moved away. But when new staff join the Real Tools team, they are quickly engaged in the mission of the museum, the seriousness of the work, and the importance of their own voices in making this work better.
| APPROACHES TO PLAY FACILITATION • Playwork: “At its most basic level, playwork is about removing barriers to play, and enriching the play environment… The role of the playworker is to create flexible environments which are substantially adaptable or controllable by the children…” • Theatrical Improvisation: “The improvisational mindset is rooted in an open and flexible attitude, based on a set of fundamental principles that are learned through engaging in improvisational games and activities.” • Kaboom / Imagination Playground: Kaboom believes that “The well-being of our communities starts with the well-being of our kids. Kids who live in low-income communities face many structural obstacles to play, such as a lack of safe play spaces or any place to play at all. We want to make it as easy as possible for all kids to learn, explore, grow and just be kids.” Play facilitators do work such as staging materials in fun ways, observing children, building relationships, promoting fair and caring behavior, and encouraging teamwork. • Play Therapy: “Play therapy differs from regular play in that the therapist uses play to help children address and resolve their own problems. Through play therapy, children learn to communicate with others, express feelings, modify behavior, develop problem solving skills, and learn a variety of ways of relating to others.” () • Montessori Education: “The art of engaging children is at the heart of the Montessori class- room. Capturing interest is the key to motivating further exploration, practice, and mastery…. Adults are tasked with the responsibility of maintaining an enriched environment always prepared for the children’s work.” • Reggio Emilia Education: “The Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education views young children as individuals who are curious about their world and have the powerful potential to learn from all that surrounds them…. Reggio teachers employ strategies such as exposing children to a wide variety of educational opportunities that encourage self-expression, communication, logical thinking, and problem-solving.” |
Inspired by the impact of the Real Tools monthly meetings, and supported by PNC Grow Up Great funding, we began to use monthly all-staff meetings to explore play facilitation. Previously, PlayHouse job descriptions classified “playologists” (our term for floor staff) as staff who engage children and families in play, along with straightening, cleaning, and troubleshooting exhibit and visitor problems. However, discussions about play facilitation were not a regular part of our dialogue with floor staff. During training and supervision, the emphasis was on efficiency rather than value, cleaning and resetting rather than learning through play. In the fall of 2018, we launched a meeting series on play facilitation, led by the museum’s education manager, Courtney Baxter. Staff were trained in reflective practice, and encouraged to experiment. They were given free rein to try things that failed, and share these failures, along with their successes.
During 2018 and 2019, we dedicated seven two-hour meetings to different approaches to play, and the role of adults in children’s play. We learned about playwork from the New Children’s Museum, theatrical improvisation from The Engaged Educator, play therapy, Montessori education, Reggio Emilia education, and Kaboom’s approach to working with Imagination Playground. (See above sidebar.) At the beginning of each meeting, staff shared the successes and failures they experienced when experimenting with these new methods. After each presentation, the group brainstormed ways in which these new ideas might apply in our context. For example, staff found the improvisational approach of “yes and…” to be a good tool for building on a child’s creative imaginings. They also valued the play therapy idea of not correcting a child, but rather entering their world. Other approaches were more difficult to relate to daily interactions in the museum, but inspired staff to think about staffing patterns and possibilities in new ways. For example, the Imagination Playground presentation was inspiring, but our playologists were unsure about how to incorporate these methods in the current way we use this interactive block set at street festivals. Perhaps there are other ways we can staff or present Imagination Playground?
This series has helped staff to think about play and play facilitation. Perhaps even more importantly, it has sent a clear message that all staff are empowered to offer visitors the best experience possible at the PlayHouse. This has led to unexpected results. Floor staff have taken responsibility for creating grassroots programming, including staff and visitor dress-up days and storytimes. And staff have created solutions to real problems, such as setting up a scavenger hunt of objects hidden near the entrance in order to keep kids occupied while parents pay or fill out a membership form.
Further, the dialogues that happen during these staff meetings have helped managerial staff get to know part-time, front-of-house staff better. We are learning about their individual strengths and interests, which allows us to find ways to leverage individual talents and passions for the benefit of the museum. This is good for the PlayHouse, but also key to staff engagement: allowing staff to use their personal skills deepens their emotional and intellectual connection to the museum. We can rarely offer promotions in our small museum, but we can work with individuals to tweak roles in ways that are beneficial for everyone.
The PlayHouse now has a new structure for all-staff meetings: they are monthly, collaborative dialogues. Of course, sometimes we share information about upcoming exhibits or programs, or conduct safety-related trainings. But we also use these meetings for discussions such as, are the props currently out on the floor working, or should we rethink some of them? If we are able to grow our volunteer program, how do we balance offering volunteers engaging tasks working directly with visitors, while still respecting the interests and abilities of the floor staff who want to engage visitors in educational activities? What are ideas related to programs for next year?
We are finding that by opening up discussion and asking for feedback we can expand the work we do. For example, while planning an event called Enchanted PlayHouse, one floor-staff member decided we needed an area that looked like a pirate ship. So she enlisted her husband to build a pirate ship with her. Visitors loved it.
Not surprisingly, we have unleashed a host of new challenges through this approach. One of the most critical is communication. When staff decide they want to do something—for example, a themed dress-up week—management staff need to know about the event, have the opportunity to voice any concerns, help promote it, and be able to answer questions about it. We used to worry that front-of-house staff were not getting all the information they needed; now we need to address this in the other direction as well.
Another challenge is capturing the results of staff experimentation. We know from discussions during staff meetings that staff are indeed experimenting and finding new ways to interact with visitors on the floor. How do we capture this information, and learn collectively from what has worked and what has failed?
Perhaps the biggest challenge is financial cost. With the new structure of our all-staff meetings, we have committed to gathering and paying part-time staff for two or more hours every month to engage in discussions that, in other museums, are the job of full-time or back-of-house staff. We are always looking for ways to cut expenses, and to many this might seem like an unnecessary one. However, the positive impact on our staff, and then on our visitors, is apparent. And we believe that, in the long run, the cost of an unengaged staff is much higher.
Despite the challenges of continued turnover, communication, or financial strains, a staff that is committed to the museum leads to improved experience for everyone involved. When management demonstrates that all staff are valued and essential to the success of an organization, and that each person has the autonomy to influence that success, we create a culture of fulfillment and engagement. We strongly believe that engaging all staff creates a vibrant and visible culture of valuing individuals that is palpable to visitors. Our mission is to help children become explorers and creators of the world. We engage our staff in this work by empowering them to be explorers and creators of the warm and captivating environment of the PlayHouse.
Rebecca Shulman Herz has served as the director of the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum since 2015. Previously, she spent fifteen years in art museum education at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Noguchi Museum, both in New York City. Kristin Vannatta was the operations manager of the Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum from 2015 until August 2019. Previously, she worked for six years as the volunteer coordinator and operations manager for the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust in Chicago, Illinois.
To read other articles in the “HR” issue of Hand to Hand, subscribe today. ACM members also receive both digital and printed complimentary copies of Hand to Hand. ACM members can access their copies through the Online Member Resource Library available in the Hand to Hand Community on ACM Groupsite.
Each year, UNICEF releases a report on the State of the World’s Children, and this year, its focus was The Changing Face of Malnutrition. This report highlights the global challenges of undernutrition, hidden hunger, and overweight—challenges recognized by our field, as seen in ACM’s Good to Grow! initiative and our 2010 publication, Healthy Kids, Healthy Museums.
In the nine years since ACM published Healthy Kids, Healthy Museums, the children’s museum field has only grown its role of using play to promote healthy communities around the world. On November 20, World Children’s Day, we’re taking a look at how children’s museums address the issue of healthy nutrition through programming and exhibits. From teaching gardens to grocery store exhibits to partnerships with local universities, the examples below offer just a few highlights of how children’s museums support healthy habits in joyful ways.
Omaha Children’s Museum (NE)’s Kitchen ABCs program teaches young children how to prepare recipes using healthy ingredients. Education staff use recipes that introduce children to ingredients they might not have tried yet, like sunflower butter, spinach, and zucchini. Kids get to pick out their aprons, decorate their own chef’s hat, and use real (kid-sized and kid-friendly) kitchen tools.
An upcoming exhibit at the Children’s Museum of the Arts (New York, NY) called Love Crickets, Save the Planet will foster a new understanding of how our food factors into a larger system. Artists Jude Tallichet and Adam Chad Brody were guided by the belief that it’s vital to expose young people to the idea that bugs are not pests—rather, they are an essential part of our ecosystem and food systems.
In the summer months, Above & Beyond Children’s Museum (Sheboygan, WI) offers the Eat, Play, Grow program in its garden space every Wednesday, coinciding with the local farmers market one block away. Inside the museum, the permanent Festival Foods Fresh Market exhibit features food toys that align with real foods found at the farmers market.
Good Food for You, a new school outreach program offered by The Magic House, St. Louis Children’s Museum (MO), promotes healthy decision-making through four portable interactive environments: a grocery store, farmers market, restaurant and home kitchen. The program aligns with school health and wellness policies and meets state guidelines for nutrition education grade-level expectations.
The Balanced Diet exhibit at the Museum of Discovery (Little Rock, AR) features a variety of foods, such as fruits, vegetables, candy, fried foods, etc. as weighted blocks. Guests choose the blocks of their choice and place them on a seesaw scale with the goal of balancing it—demonstrating how we need more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains than we do sugary or high fat foods.
In the new Let’s Get Cooking Lab at the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire (WI), kids and their grownups cook real food, using real cooking tools, and prepare it in a real test kitchen. This space is phase one of the museum’s new Eat! Move! Live! exhibit. Phases two and three include the forthcoming Rocket Park and Shape Up fitness trail.
As part of the Kroger Zero Hunger Zero Waste movement, Imagine Children’s Museum (Everett, WA) highlights ways to avoid food waste during events on Earth Day and World Food Day. Activities include dehydrating, canning, re-rooting vegetables, and using refrigerator leftovers to make a “scrap” soup. The museum aims to make its nutrition programs and events fun and engaging, so that families don’t feel they are being judged—instead sending them away with something to think about that may encourage them to change just one thing.
Children’s Museum of Atlanta (GA) offers the Eat a Georgia Rainbow program every Sunday. Visitors join the museum’s Imaginators in a scavenger hunt plus a cold cooking activity, featuring fruits and vegetables that can be harvested in Georgia throughout the year.
At The Teaching Kitchen at the Children’s Museum of Denver at Marsico Campus (CO), in-house chefs inspire guests to think differently about food, combining fresh, nutritious ingredients and kid-friendly recipes and tools. Cooking class participants experience an array of recipes centered on a monthly theme, including pear slaw, peach pie pancakes, fall spiced hummus, and strawberry bruschetta.
On the first Friday of every month, San Diego Children’s Discovery Museum (CA) partners with Jimbo’s Naturally Escondido for a hands-on activity introducing children and their families to healthy eating. Each event features a child-friendly recipe with local, seasonal ingredients.
Cincinnati Museum Center (OH) is collaborating with Kent State University and LaSoupe (a local food rescue) on Food for Thought, a three-year National Science Foundation-funded project to use cooking to help families engage their children in conversations about science. The project will focus on serving those living with food insecurity.
Discovery Gateway Children’s Museum (Salt Lake City, UT) provides educational programming around gardening and growing food. The museum aims to help children and their caretakers learn more about the importance of healthy fruits and vegetables, and to grow their own when possible.
The Children’s Museum of the Treasure Coast (Jensen Beach, FL) recently offered its Germs, Germs, Germs outreach program free of charge to all Headstart and Voluntary PreKindergarten classes in its school district. Preschoolers especially love seeing “germs” glow on their hands. Teachers have reported back that, after participating, students pay more attention to washing their hands.
Lynn Meadows Discovery Center (Gulfport, MS) offers monthly programs developed especially for Girl Scouts. Its January program will be a badge workshop focused on nutrition and fitness for Brownie, Juniors, and Cadette Girl Scouts.
The DoSeum (San Antonio, TX)’s onsite preschool, The Littler Doer, teaches preschoolers how to make healthy choices, with a focus on why we want to take care of our bodies and the environment. Learning stays fun and STEAM-oriented with hands-on projects such as taste testing and painting with veggies.
The Learning Garden at The Children’s Museum of Memphis (TN) changes with the season, providing the museum with a fun variety of programming throughout the year. Garden demonstrations include pickling, making organic pesticides from marigolds, composting, and more.
Good nutrition, healthy portions, and natural food elements run through three exhibits at Exploration Place (Wichita, KS): Kansas Kids Connect (focused on farm-to-table concepts), Where Kids Rule (a three-story castle with a Produce Department and Seafood Department), and Explore Kansas (which introduces visitors to food production).
At Virginia Discovery Museum (Charlottesville), children tend to crops in the Discovery Farm exhibit, then share what they have prepared with caregivers in Little C’ville Panera Café. By working in tandem, these two exhibits allow children from diverse backgrounds to learn the value of healthy food choices.
COSI (Columbus, OH) supports healthy nutrition learning through the annual COSI Science Festival, which includes hands-on partner events such as “STEM on the Urban Farm,” “Science in the Kitchen,” and “Be a Gardener.”
One of the museum staff’s favorite moments this year at Kansas Children’s Discovery Center (Topeka) was when children independently harvested vegetables from the outdoor garden and brought them into the museum’s grocery store exhibit. All by themselves, children created connections between how food is grown and consumed!
Port Discovery Children’s Museum (Baltimore, MD) offers the Healthy Habits afterschool program in partnership with the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Over five weeks, students explore healthy eating, activities, and topics through interactive lessons and guided play.
The Kids Can Cook! summer camp at Mt. Pleasant Discovery Museum (MI) teaches children ages five to ten how to safely prepare a healthy breakfast, snack, and lunch on their own, while learning about healthy alternatives and balanced plates.
Imagine Nation, A Museum Early Learning Center (Bristol, CT) believes the full experience of food and its preparation is key to developing healthy mindful children (as part of the museum’s Reggio Emilia approach). Each year, children in the museum’s early learning school prepare side dishes for the museum’s annual Day of Thanks luncheon around Thanksgiving.
Southern California Children’s Museum (Pasadena) hosts Fun Foodie Fridays, a weekly food and nutrition class that teaches children how to make nutritious snacks, using many ingredients from SCCM’s small onsite garden. Kids love making and eating the snacks, and grownups love that they learn about nutrition along the way! SCCM also partners with its local Whole Foods to educate families about healthy eating.
During one recent program in the Learning Garden at London Children’s Museum (Ontario, Canada), visitors harvested fresh herbs to make pesto. One child was hesitant to taste pesto at first, but was extremely engaged in the process of making it. Once his own batch was ready, he was more than happy to try it. By giving children control and ownership over the food being prepared, they often become more motivated and excited to eat it.
In Aunt Sugar’s Farm at Mid-Michigan Children’s Museum (Saginaw), visitors can pick fruits and veggies and “cook” them in the kitchen. The gallery lets children discover the farm-to-table pathway as they use their imaginations to role-play as farmers, chefs, and anything in-between.
The Children’s Museum of South Dakota (Brookings) is launching a year-round farm-to-table experience in collaboration with Missouri River Energy Services, the Electric Power Research Institute, and South Dakota State University (SDSU). The project features a high-tech “farm-in-a-box” inside a 40-foot container, where produce will grow vertically without soil. SDSU graduate students will harvest the produce, which will be used in the museum’s café as well as distributed to local organizations working to reduce food insecurity.
ImagineU Children’s Museum (Visalia, CA) is located in California’s Central Valley, a known agriculture community. The farmer’s market, orchard, cattle, and dairy exhibits help educate kids on the food process from start to finish, through play. The museum also hosts different nonprofits that bring a hands-on gardening experience into the museum.
As part of its early childhood programming, Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh (PA) offers two regular programs focusing on nutrition and wellness: Wellness Wednesdays (a monthly program in partnership with WIC) and Young Sprouts (a weekly garden program). The museum has also partnered with a local after-school program to offer weekly cooking programming for middle school girls. (Photo Credit: Megan McGinley)
EcoTarium (Worcester, MA) incorporates nutrition-focused efforts into its Countdown to Kindergarten partnership with the Worcester Public School District, such as teaching preschoolers how to pack healthy snacks and navigate the school cafeteria. The museum works with the school district nursing team, as well as several dental groups, to teach kids about the importance of eating healthy foods and brushing their teeth.
DISCOVERY Children’s Museum (Las Vegas, NV) offers the kindergarten program Let’s Eat! Food and Nutrition. Lessons include how the digestive system works and how to use the USDA’s nutrition guide, MyPlate.
In partnership with The Creative Kitchen and Bean Sprouts, Kidspace Children’s Museum (Pasadena, CA) hosted the first-ever Kids Food Festival on the West Coast in August! This interactive weekend included hands-on cooking classes and exhibitors of all-natural products. Kidspace wanted to be a resource for families looking for opportunities to figure out how to balance their busy family lives with school, exercise, eating their greens, and finding time to play.
Louisiana Children’s Museum (New Orleans) is developing camps and programs themed around food to complement permanent exhibits such as Follow That Food. This December, LCM’s second “Community” camp will explore the question: “How do we grow, prepare, and share food in a community?”
Says Sierra Torres from Louisiana Children’s Museum, “Children are natural explorers and have an innate curiosity for the world around them. It is our job in the museum to answer these questions and help children connect the dots so that they can have a more holistic view of the food system and therefore, can make informed decisions about what they are putting in their bodies.”
These principles are put in action throughout the children’s museum field—where healthy nutrition is learned through play.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The children’s museum field has a long history of stepping up to support their communities in times of need. We’re heartened by the strength of California children’s museums as they offer children and families a retreat for playful learning to families affected by widespread fires in the state.
The Children’s Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, California, has dealt with the devastating impact of both fires and a flood in its community over the past three years. Throughout these challenges, the museum has pursued its mission to inspire curiosity and creativity through joyful, transformative experiences.
Even though the museum was closed temporarily due to nearby evacuations, they still put their community first by developing a resource list, as well as compiling a list of museums throughout California that are offering free or reduced admission to families affected by the Kincade fire.
In recognition of the effects fires have on the communities it serves, the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County has compiled a list of helpful resources for children and families coping with trauma. The museum provides this list as a reference tool and does not endorse or claim to have personal knowledge of the abilities of those listed.
The Children’s Museum of Sonoma County is updating this list in real time as it receives confirmation of museums offering free admission. This list may not include all museums offering free admission; list is current as of October 30, 2019.
Thank you to the following California museums for supporting our community:
These resources first appeared on the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County’s website.
The Children’s Museum of Sonoma County in Santa Rosa, California, provides hands-on, interactive exhibits and activities in a safe environment that are custom designed for families with children aged ten years old and younger. Follow the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
On September 20, in support of youth voices and in recognition of the challenges our society faces, ACM shared the ACM Climate Crisis and Resiliency Task Force Statement, with a preliminary draft action plan. This statement is the latest in a suite of work from the ACM Board of Directors’ Climate Crisis and Resiliency Task Force, first launched in February 2019.
As a next step, ACM hosted a leadership call on October 10 to engage children’s museum staff from across ACM’s membership in discussing how our field can mobilize around the climate crisis.
To start the call, we considered the question of “Why us, why now?” As ACM Executive Director Laura Huerta Migus explained, our conversations are grounded in ACM’s Strategic Roadmap, anchored by our vision of a world that honors all children and respects the diverse ways in which they learn and develop. Climate is a global issue affecting the lives of the children we serve, and the operations of our member institutions. In fact, ACM has been called to respond to concrete examples of climate crises, as seen through the mobilization of the ACM Disaster Relief Fund in recent years.
Next, we polled the participants on the call, asking them, “What is the most top of mind issue around climate and resilience for your museum?” Respondents overwhelmingly answered, “How to increase public awareness/education on climate change.”
These results highlighted another motivator to initiate the Climate Change Task Force: the growing youth movement around the climate crisis, including the recent Global Youth Climate Strikes. Brenda Baker, Vice President – Initiatives of the ACM Board of Directors, noted the importance of lifting youth voices as an association dedicated to children’s museums. She advocated that our field consider how to amplify youth voices, and rethink the ways we position ourselves in our communities as a result.
As a way of illustrating the ways museums are already taking action on the climate crisis, several members of the ACM Board Task Force presented the work their museums are currently doing.
Brenda Baker shared Madison Children’s Museum’s two new exhibits, Forces of Nature (about alternative energy) and My Planet, My Future (about reinforcing environmental stewardship), the latest in twenty-five years of environmental work from the museum.
Joe Cox from the Museum of Discovery and Science noted that his museum frames its work by asking, “What are the skills we can give children so they can thrive in a new world?” This attitude is seen in projects such as Aptitude, a workforce development program that encouraged students to develop an app on Climate Change and Coral Reefs.
Lara Litchfield Kimber described how Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum is building in climate education into the museum’s ongoing expansion project. The forthcoming Mid-Hudson Science Center will have a dedicated gallery to climate science and clean energy.
Tifferney White described a large suite of climate science work done at Discovery Place Science, including the Explore More Life exhibition dedicated to biodiversity and sustainability. The new Discovery Place Nature will also be organized with the big idea of moving people from reflection to transformation around climate.
Next, Laura asked the Task Force to weigh in on an important question: how can our field handle the challenges of addressing the climate crisis? Brenda noted that we need to act more quickly and more boldly, and that our field must work to share resources. Joe added, “There’s so much to learn and so much to do, we need to work together to have solid solutions.” Lara and Tifferney both noted the issue of urgency, acknowledging the challenges of conveying a state of urgency. Both Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum and Discovery Place are using growth projects as an opportunity to spark these conversations at the community level.
Next, Brenda shared the Task Force’s ACM Climate Crisis and Resiliency Task Force Statement and Action Plan in more detail. In the preliminary action plan, the Task Force identified five “areas of influence” where children’s museums are poised to create change: Programmatic Experiences, Alliances and Advocacy, Documentation and Research, Outreach, and Association Infrastructure. The first two areas, Programmatic Experiences and Alliances and Advocacy, provide opportunities for ACM member engagement around creating collective action and elevating youth voice. Documentation and Research outlines what the field has already done, what we’re doing currently, and future best practices and actions. Outreach is about understanding larger trends within both the museum and sustainability fields. Association Infrastructure looks at how ACM can update its operations to proactively respond to climate change.
Following the action plan, webinar participants engaged in a lively discussion, guided by two sets of questions:
Over the next six months, the Task Force will continue to grapple with these questions, in collaboration with engaged ACM members, to expand upon this preliminary action plan. Ultimately, a final draft will be presented to the children’s museum field during ACM’s upcoming conference, InterActivity 2020: PLAY The Long Game, in St. Louis from May 5-8.
Click here to watch a recording of the presentation, and here to download the slides. Interested in joining the conversation? Join the ACM Climate Crisis Community on ACM Groupsite.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
The following post appears in the latest issue of Hand to Hand, ACM’s quarterly journal.
By Sharon Vegh Williams, PhD
The North Country Children’s Museum is located in Potsdam, New York, a remote, rural, low-income community in the northern corner of the state. The North Country Region is near the Canadian border, north of the Adirondack Mountains. The county is the largest by square mile in the state and the most sparsely populated. We’re seven hours from New York City and five hours from Buffalo. All of Upstate New York is downstate for us. There is a palpable remoteness to the region, with miles of flat farmland, rivers, and woodlands. One of our fastest growing communities is the Amish, as farmland is inexpensive and not amenable to large-scale farming. Adding to the geographic isolation, the North Country has long cold winters and very little access to cultural or educational enrichment for families. Although institutions such as Clarkson University and SUNY Potsdam in Potsdam and St. Lawrence University and SUNY Canton in our neighboring town, Canton, are a defining feature of the region, university resources are not always easily accessible to the greater community. To address the cultural and educational gap for families, a group of local educators, university faculty, and parents began discussing the idea of a children’s museum in early 2012. That summer, leveraging university resources, we launched our first Museum Without Walls traveling exhibit. For the next six years, the museum trailer with pop-up interactive exhibits and programs traveled weekly to small town festivals, bookstores, bakeries, schools, camps, and community centers.
As co-founder of the North Country Children’s Museum, the seed for the museum germinated eight years before that first traveling exhibit, when my eldest son was two years old and we were living on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico. The closest city was Durango, Colorado, where my family had joined a small children’s museum. At the time, the Durango Children’s Museum was on the second floor of a downtown storefront. The creative spirit behind this small institution was inspiring. The exhibits were community-made and low-key, but truly engaging and innovative. Visits were worth the hour-and-a-half drive, especially with the limited family destination options in our rural New Mexico town.
While we were new members of this small museum, I had years of experience as a museum educator and classroom teacher. I had worked at the Boston Children’s Museum for five years before going back to school for a master’s degree program in education and creative arts at Lesley University. I went on to teach elementary school for over a decade, in low-income, diverse public schools in urban and suburban Boston and later on the Navajo Nation. My time as a classroom teacher taught me how to engage learners. And teaching in diverse communities that had historically been disenfranchised from schooling challenged me to develop curriculum and a learning environment that was intrinsically interesting and motivating for kids. At times, that required working around restrictive public school standards. As an educator and parent, I have always been interested in how informal and interactive education can provide rich and powerful learning experiences for children.
As my family had plans to relocate to northern New York, I realized I could contribute by helping to bring a small town children’s museum to my new community. From the inception of the idea in 2004, to the opening of museum doors fourteen years later, I traveled widely with my family, visiting every interactive museum along the way, collecting ideas. When my family arrived in Potsdam in 2008, I was ready to get started on the museum. However, I soon realized it was too big an undertaking to do on my own. My friend and neighbor, April Vasher-Dean, director of The Art Museum at SUNY Potsdam, was ready to embark on this journey with me. April had twenty-five years of experience in art museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art in Indiana. Because we both had museum backgrounds, we came to the project with a shared vision. This team effort was critical, as our community had no idea where we were headed. Many people envisioned a basement playroom, while April and I saw the Smithsonian. We had a lot of work to do educating the public about children’s museums, what they are, and why they matter.
We also had a lot of naysayers. Many did not believe we could find the funding or the audience in our remote, rural region to start or sustain such an institution. My guiding words of wisdom came U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ quote, “Most of the things worth doing in the world were declared impossible before they were done.” And my silent sentiment was, “Get out of my way, I have a museum to build!” To say I was on fire with our mission would have been putting it mildly.
While April and I had worked in museums for years, we had never started one. We connected with the Association of Children’s Museums and worked our way through their publication Collective Vision: Starting and Sustaining a Children’s Museum. Following the guidance in the book, we created a traveling “museum without walls” to build an audience. April and I also traveled together to Boston and New York City to meet with children’s museum professionals in both large and small institutions. Back home, we gathered a group of educators, scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, accountants, lawyers, business owners, general contractors, and parents to contribute their expertise and form a nonprofit board. We are fortunate to live in an area with a wealth of skilled professionals, including university faculty eager to volunteer their time, energy, and resources. Clarkson University Business School faculty and students conducted a feasibility study, which gave us the confidence to move forward with fundraising and program development. While our museum without walls traveled the region, bringing sophisticated, state-of-the-art exhibits and programs to rural communities, we got to work on a capital campaign.
The end game was always a permanent location for the museum, though we had no idea of either scope or scale when we started. Neither April nor I had any idea how to raise money. And as it turned out, no one else on the board did either. Fortunately, through a shop owner in town, I heard about someone living temporarily in the area who had just completed a multimillion-dollar capital campaign for the Young At Art Museum in Davie, Florida. This was an amazing stroke of luck, since most people in the North Country had no idea what a children’s museum was, let alone had worked for one. We brought Melissa Wagner on board to steer us in the right direction. For me, she was a mentor and teacher for the two years she lived here. I learned about government funding, foundations, in-kind donations, and how to write grants. I learned how to reach out to businesses, universities, and individuals for support. We put together marketing materials and packets to reach potential donors. We formed a founder’s circle and created a series of high-end cocktail parties that showcased our programming, bringing some black-tie to a distinctly flannel-and-Carhartt community. We raised the bar and exceeded expectations both in the events and in our institutional vision. Navigating our rural, high-poverty region without deep pockets, we left no stone unturned. Six years later, we had raised over one million dollars, purchased and renovated a long-vacant historic downtown building, and hired professional exhibit designer Wayne LeBar to collaborate with teams of local content specialists.
When our permanent location opened in 2018, the exhibit concepts, developed by the board and local content experts in a variety of fields, had been in the works for years. Many exhibit prototypes had been tested and modified through our museum without walls. Since most of our visitors are local, membership is our bread and butter. Our exhibits needed to engage families who were going to come weekly; each exhibit component needed to be endlessly compelling. Not everything brought to the table passed that test. For example, the designers suggested a sugar shack as part of our maple tree exhibit, but there wasn’t enough activity involved to keep visitors engaged. There was also a proposal for local maker video interactive, which I didn’t feel would be varied enough to keep repeat visitors interested. My twenty-five years as an educator gave me a fine-tuned sense of what to keep and what to weed out.
Ultimately, our exhibits built on the strengths and supported the needs of our rural, low-income community. We highlighted local farmers in our Natural Foods Grocery store exhibit, celebrated our maple traditions in a digital tree interactive, and explored the science of hydroelectric power though the Adirondack Waterplay exhibit. We collaborated with university faculty to create our STEAM Power exhibit, and designed our sensory Playspace for our youngest visitors. We filled 3,500 square feet of exhibit space with bright, open, beautifully crafted exhibits that tell the story of our community. We also collaborated with a local farming museum and skilled trades high school to restore a historic tractor for outdoor play that complements our building, a renovated barn and livery circa 1840. In an economically depressed county where one-third of families with children live below the poverty line, we brought a sense of pride and celebration of our community assets.
We also added a program room, drawing from the university community to hire an amazing staff of skilled science and arts educators. The North Country Children’s Museum now offers STEAM workshops throughout the week, free for visitors and members. We are working to bring more cultural knowledge into the mix, meeting with community members and farmers to explore ways in which we can bring agriculture more explicitly into our programming.
We believe that giving children opportunities to explore mathematics, engineering, language, and the arts in playful ways nurtures the creative problem solvers our world so desperately needs. Our mission is to provide children, regardless of socioeconomic background, with the space to try on the role of scientist, engineer, and artist. In the media, we often hear outside experts weigh in on the economic and social challenges facing rural America. However, those without a deep understanding and compassion for these struggles will never fully address them. To solve the issues that confront humanity and the planet, from income inequality to racism to climate change, we need to provide all children—urban, suburban, small town, and rural—with resources and intellectual tools. Our museum’s role is to create an environment, in rural northern New York, where children can grow to become active and engaged problem-solvers in much the same way as children from relatively resource-rich urban areas can. The world needs their voices, insights and creativity.
As the only children’s museum within a two-hour radius, we have become a much-needed resource. Our community has responded with 600 member families, 15,000 visitors, and 75 school groups in our first ten months of operations. To ensure we are serving all members of our community, we offer $25 annual memberships to families with children eligible for free or reduced school lunches. These costs are offset by donations from the local hospital, banks, and individual families who can donate a “giving membership” to a local family in need. With limited funding allocated to rural public schools, the museum has become a supportive learning resource for the region.
Started six years ago on a shoestring budget, the North Country Children’s Museum raised over $1,000,000, purchased and renovated an historic building, and created a state-of-the-art interactive museum, despite the challenges of raising capital in a low-income area. In other words, the community believed in our mission and viability. In our first ten months, we have fully maximized and practically outgrown our space. Fortunately, we have a second floor with an additional 3,500 square feet in which to expand. Plans are in the works to double the museum’s exhibit and program capacity by renovating the unused part of the building within the next few years. We hope to create a dairy farm and an Amish home exhibit in collaboration with those communities.
As passionate as we are about promoting our educational mission, we are ultimately a community museum. And the community takes ownership of the space. The other day, I noticed a group of parents from very different socioeconomic, cultural, racial, religious, and linguistic backgrounds gathering and chatting before our drop-in early childhood STEAM program. These families had formed real connections and friendships through our weekly programing—connections that lived beyond the walls of the institution. In such politically and culturally divisive times, before the museum opened, many of these parents in this small, remote community would not have had another space to reach across perceived barriers. As this part of the country evolves along with the rest of the world, the true mission of the museum will unfold in its own way, and North Country Children’s Museum will be here to usher that future in.
Sharon Vegh Williams, PhD, is the co-founder and executive director of the North Country Children’s Museum in Potsdam, New York. She teaches courses in museum studies and multicultural education at St. Lawrence University. Her book, Native Cultural Competency in Mainstream Schooling, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.
To read other articles in the “The Big Role of Children’s Museums in Small Communities” issue of Hand to Hand, subscribe today. ACM members also receive both digital and printed complimentary copies of Hand to Hand. ACM members can access their copies through the Online Member Resource Library. Contact Membership@ChildrensMuseums.org to gain access if needed
By Jenni Martin
Children’s museums, because of our unique focus on audience rather than content, are often at the forefront of innovative museum practice around diversity, equity, access, and inclusion (DEAI). Our roots are deeply embedded in our communities, and our institutional goals focus on reflecting those communities in exhibits, programs, events and audience. As a field, children’s museums are often more willing than other museums to try new approaches for ensuring we are serving the unique needs of our individual communities.
With the understanding that it’s never been more important to understand DEAI practices in the museums, CCLI is launching a groundbreaking, industry-wide study this September focused solely on these practices in museums: The National Landscape Study: DEAI Practices in Museums.
Through a carefully vetted survey instrument, this study will:
The survey will engage museums of every discipline, size, and region, to paint a picture of the entire museum sector—making it important for as many museums as possible to participate. We know that the children’s museums excel in reaching diverse audiences in creative and successful ways. However, we have not always focused on documenting these innovative practices. This survey is our opportunity as a field to have our voices heard and our strategies documented in the greater museum field.
A report of the findings will be released in the spring of 2020. The results will benefit museum leaders with important insights into where their organization is relative to the field, relevant data for decision-making and strategic planning, and information that will support staff development.
| ABOUT CCLI The survey is sponsored by CCLI (Cultural Competence Learning Institute), a process and set of resources designed to help museums increase their organizational capacity around diversity, inclusion, and culture. CCLI is a partnership between ACM, Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, the Association of Science-Technology Centers, and Garibay Group. As a yearlong professional development institute, CCLI helps museum leaders catalyze diversity and inclusion efforts in their institutions. Recently awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, CCLI has expanded its focus and invested in long-term sustainability to develop, track, promote, and recognize DEAI efforts within individual institutions andthe field at large. The upcoming survey is one component of CCLI’s National Leadership Grant. Said Stephanie Ratcliffe, executive director of The Wild Center in upstate New York, about her museum’s participation in CCLI’s yearlong institute: “The CCLI program supported our efforts to construct a series of professional development activities to fundamentally change how we approach diversity broadly and the tools to move staff through an effective learning process. Our efforts were just the beginning of an organization-wide shift that continues today.“ CCLI has already reached more than twenty-five museums, including children’s museums, science centers, nature centers, zoos and aquariums, and natural history museums, and seventy-five individual participants. Applications for CCLI’s next cohort will be accepted until November 19, 2019. Find more information here: https://community.astc.org/ccli/home |
The National Landscape Study: DEAI Practices in Museums is launching today, Thursday, September 5. Primary contacts at ACM member museums (typically the museum’s CEO or Executive Director) will have received an email from Garibay Group with a unique survey link. Different people at your organization will likely contribute to completing the survey, so, in addition to the Survey Monkey format, a printable Google format will also be included.
It is so critical that children’s museums of every size and region be represented. The more diverse the input, the more useful the results will be for the field and for your organization. Look for this email (or ask your CEO about it) to ensure your organization’s data is included.
Jenni Martin is CCLI Project Director and Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.
By Jennifer Rehkamp
Children’s museums are known for being joyful spaces where children can learn through play—and more than just fun places to visit. The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) defines a children’s museum as a nonprofit educational and cultural institution committed to serving the needs and interests of children by providing exhibits and programs that stimulate curiosity and motivate learning.
But how exactly do children’s museums support children’s learning? The Children’s Museum Research Network (CMRN) is working to use research to identify just this. Since 2014, this collective of ACM, the University of Washington’s Museology Graduate Program, and fifteen children’s museums have worked together to complete research studies that show the learning value of children’s museums.
CMRN recently completed its third research study, examining how caregivers see their children learn during museum visits. In 2017, CMRN surveyed visitors to eight children’s museums across the United States to examine the following questions:
The study found that 70 percent of caregivers surveyed reported observing something about how their children learn during their children’s museum visit, such as their learning processes, preferences, characteristics, or skills. During follow-up interviews, caregivers shared they saw children’s museums as unique environments because of the variety of activities, spaces intentionally designed to support children’s learning and development, and opportunities for purposeful, hands-on play.
The study also found that intentionally designed exhibit environments make children’s museums places where parents and caregivers can observe their child learning. This study underscores the importance of children’s museums as spaces that both promote children’s play-based learning and allow parents and caregivers to observe their children’s learning in a unique way.
What does this research mean for parents and caregivers? Take time to observe your child learning the next time you visit your local children’s museums. You’ll likely learn about their interests, motivations, and how they gather information about the world—helping you to support their learning outside the museum visit.
Jennifer Rehkamp is Director of Field Services at the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Follow ACM on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
By Laura Huerta Migus
Children’s museum professionals face a unique challenge in the museum field: people often ask us, “What is a children’s museum?”
Children’s museums have led the way in so many important trends in the museum community: a focus on using objects, hands-on learning, and putting children first. But this work can be invisible to those unfamiliar with it.
Over the past couple of years, ACM has grappled with this question, resulting in our new document, “What Is A Children’s Museum?,” which articulates how every children’s museum–regardless of its size–functions across four key dimensions: local destinations, community resources, educational laboratories, and advocates for children.
We debuted this document at InterActivity 2019: FearLESS. Since then, we’ve fine-tuned it into a two-pager that shares “What Is A Children’s Museum?” and “The Four Dimensions of Children’s Museums.”
Laura Huerta Migus is executive director of the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM). Follow ACM on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
By Elissa K. Miller, M.Ed.
Even though outsiders may think it’s an oxymoron for a nonprofit museum to earn revenue, all nonprofits must bring in money to support their missions. It’s a wise practice for museum education departments to increase revenue and reduce overhead so that more funds are available to support and expand mission-delivering programs.
There are a number of different ways that children’s museums can increase revenue and minimize administration costs while expanding education programs.
These budget-friendly methods leverage museum software and streamline museum operations to create both the funding and staff time to develop new programs that extend your reach and your mission.
Ready to boost your museum’s education revenue? Let’s get started.
If your education department is still relying on paper registration forms and spreadsheets to manage events, camps, classes, field trips, and birthday parties, you could be wasting valuable time and money better spent on enhancing the quality of your program.
The first step toward increasing revenue and reducing paperwork is implementing online registrations and reservations.
Moving registrations online doesn’t mean you’ll lose the personal touch. By eliminating the need to juggle calendars, update spreadsheets, record payments, and send invoices and confirmations, well-designed online registration actually frees your team to spend more time helping people who need assistance.
An online registration system is also more eco-friendly, eliminating printing and postage costs. And, online registration can help you reach a broader audience through online ads, articles and social media posts.
The best registration software will be flexible enough to meet your museum’s unique requirements. To read more information about evaluating museum software solutions, check out Doubleknot’s museum software guide.
Asking for a donation during a purchase is a proven-successful method of raising additional funds. People are already opening their wallets to make a payment, so asking them to add a few more dollars to their existing bill to support your programs is an easier proposition than responding to a standard donation request. Consider updating your registration and payment pages to:
Be sure to coordinate any donation requests with your fundraising and development team to ensure that your plans complement overall fundraising activities instead of competing or interfering with them.
Along with day camps and birthday parties, family events are often the bread-and-butter for children’s museums, offering a range of fun and educational opportunities to learn about different cultures within the communities you serve.
Consider holding these kinds of eye-opening programs to celebrate the countries and cultures in your service area.
You can expand the cultural awareness of your youngest visitors by planning museum events to guide them through multicultural exhibits, create culturally-inspired crafts, or read insightful children’s stories.
Products that support your mission (and incidentally build your brand) are always appropriate and acceptable add-on opportunities.
For example, if your museum software supports mobile sales, you can also sell camp- and event-related products at check-in and check-out for these programs. Families may be more inclined to make an on-site impulse purchase when they see how happy and engaged their children are in your programs.
Birthday parties offer income opportunities that also provide a valuable service for busy families. Your team can reduce parents’ stress and increase revenue by offering add-on options such as:
Check to see whether your registration and reservation system allows you to display upsell options after a purchase is completed. An ideal system will allow you to promote products and events in categories related to the items in the purchase.
Plus, the revenue you make from these upsell opportunities can help provide more money for your mission and educational programming.
With the increased emphasis on STEAM education, children’s museums are uniquely positioned to develop programs that are aligned with important educational standards. If your museum’s group visit programs are primarily unstructured visits under the supervision of teachers and chaperones, you may have an opportunity to offer more tailored programs. These could include teacher- or staff-led lessons and activities that rely on materials and facilities at the museum.
Additionally, scouting badge programs can provide an opportunity to generate more revenue and encourage more learning. Your badge “menu” could include self-guided activities to complete badge requirements; add-on kits and materials for use by leaders; and structured badge achievement activities led by staff.
Most kids who grow up visiting a beloved children’s museum will eventually decide they’re too old to go anymore. While older children will age out of floor activities designed for younger learners, there are many ways that older children and teens can continue enjoying your museum in age-appropriate ways.
For middle school students and younger high school students, after-school and weekend STEAM programs provide important enrichment opportunities and allow youth to continue their relationship with the museum they loved as younger children.
School districts and regional education centers can help identify scope and sequence for themes and topics that complement, strengthen and extend subjects covered in school. Your museum can then use these themes and topics to design programs at your museum.
In most locations, it’s difficult for parents to find summer programs for tweens and young teens who’ve “aged out” of traditional day camps but are too young to be camp leaders or hold other summer jobs. Parents are likely especially happy to enroll older children in summer programs that balance the right amount of supervision and structure with independence and autonomy so important at that age.
Children’s museums are in a unique position to provide formal and informal information about positive youth development to parents and caregivers.
Parents are likely interested in programs that show them to nurture and support their children’s love of experimentation and learning. For example, evening workshops on easy at-home science experiments or “STEAM Power at Home” can generate additional revenue and empower families to carry out your mission in their own homes and neighborhoods.
Another option is creating and offering continuing education (CE) courses for educators, developed with input from districts and education centers to ensure that they meet your district’s and state’s standards. Some event ticketing and registration solutions designed to support museum education will even automatically generate and email a personalized certificate of completion after the workshop is over.
The educational (and revenue-generating) opportunities that children’s museums can provide are almost limitless. We hope that this brief list will spark ideas for events and programs as unique as your museum and the communities you serve.
Elissa K. Miller, M.Ed., is communications director at Doubleknot, an integrated online, on-site, and mobile solutions provider for nonprofits. As the former development director for a regional nonprofit, she’s passionate about helping nonprofits and youth-serving organizations harness new technologies to streamline operations and support their missions.
The following post appears in the latest issue of Hand to Hand, ACM’s quarterly journal.
By Charlie Trautmann, PhD, and Janna Doherty
STEM exhibits. STEM programs. STEM events. We hear a lot about children’s museums adding STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) to their educational offerings. Some museums also add an “A” for Art (STEAM). But what does STEM really mean in the context of a children’s museum, or in an early childhood area of a science center? What constitutes a “valid” STEM experience? And how can a museum set up appropriate learning goals for STEM experiences for early learners?
One useful framework for thinking about these questions starts with three broad aspects of STEM:
STEM in children’s museums encompasses a broad range of activities and when developing such activities, it increases the learning impact to include as many of these three elements as possible. Children’s museums often include STEM in much of what they do—sometimes without even knowing it. But museums can have the greatest impact when they help learners and/or their caregivers recognize how an activity specifically supports STEM learning.
Widely available STEM content offers many opportunities for introducing concepts through exhibits, programs, and activities. The content matter for Science, the “S” in STEM, spans from astronomy to zoology. Technology includes materials and objects that range from tiny devices to software to huge facilities, which can encompass building structures, water play, and working with model trains and traffic signals. Engineering includes concepts such as strength, flexibility, and balance, plus the design of things that people use. Math includes geometry, numbers, and patterns, among many other concepts. All of these STEM content areas can find a home among the exhibits, programs, and events of a children’s museum, and endless print and online resources provide ideas for creative staff who wish to include STEM in their offerings.
However, research on learning has shown that developing activities with the goal of simply teaching content, including STEM, can actually be counterproductive in the preschool years. There is little research showing that rote acquisition of STEM facts at an early age leads children to consider STEM careers or even to develop useful STEM skills later in life. Instead, we advocate using STEM content as a platform, or base, for meaningful learning about STEM skills and STEM habits of mind.
Skills, the second key element of STEM, utilize critical thinking and problem solving to make connections across multiple domains of children’s development. STEM skills have their basis in science process skills, such as observing, classifying, asking questions, predicting, experimenting, and modeling. Everyday tasks in a child’s life, such as solving a puzzle, learning to get dressed, or testing out the properties of primary colors, can reinforce STEM skills. Each discipline involves further skills such as identifying categories in science, ushiing tools in technology, repurposing materials in engineering, or measuring in math, which build on proficiency and mastery across STEM practices. These competencies can be learned and practiced from an early age, and activities based on children’s natural curiosity form an ideal way to build STEM skills.
In science, for example, process skills include asking a question (e.g. “Are all of my fingerprints the same?”), creating a hypothesis, designing an experiment to test it, analyzing the results, and communicating the findings effectively to others. Young scientists are often curious about concrete things, like their own body or the food they eat, from their worldview. Taking this curiosity a step further and asking children to share their reasoning for a hypothesis or observation promotes more advanced science thinking.
Technology is generally seen as the process of making things, or using tools, materials, and skills to improve something or create novel solutions or products. Building with blocks is a time-tested introduction to technology skill building. Through exhibits, programs, and events, children’s museums have many other opportunities for young visitors to learn about the process of building by using simple tools and materials.
Engineering, the third element of STEM, is a process for designing solutions to problems that involves meeting a goal while working within constraints. The photo on the cover of this issue shows students engaged with the problem: “How can we design a model windmill that will lift a cupful of pennies on a string (the goal), using the materials and equipment provided (the constraints)?” Iteration, controlling variables, and persisting through failure are key elements in early engineering experiences. It is important to break down the engineering design cycle into smaller parts (build and test) or to simplify materials (paper strips, straws, and paperclips), so young children can focus on using familiar materials in new ways. This removes extraneous information and allows the engineering thought processes to come through.
Mathematics, the fourth element of STEM, is vast and influences the other three at almost every step. Math skills include the ability to count, measure, estimate, and solve problems, as well as perform other activities such as sorting a series of 3D objects by color, shape, or size, identifying patterns, or making inferences based on statistical reasoning. While these seem like complex activities, children do them every day. Children’s museums can help visitors improve their motivation and skills by providing engaging, challenging activities based on math.
While each area of STEM has a set of process skills, in reality, these skill sets overlap and reinforce each other. For example, being able to count and measure (math) is key for collecting data needed to test a hypothesis (science) or assessing whether a constructed model (technology) adequately solves a problem (engineering).
Perhaps the most important part of STEM for museum visitors is the set of habits of mind that lead children to engage with STEM in the first place, or make use of STEM later in a career or daily life. STEM habits of mind are ways of thinking that become so integrated into a student’s learning that they become mental habits. Key habits of mind associated with STEM include traits such as curiosity, creativity, collaboration, communication, confidence, critical thinking, and leadership, along with other traits such as open-mindedness, skepticism, and persistence.
Most of these traits could apply equally well to non-STEM fields, such as drama, sports, or music. So how does a children’s museum offer a program in creativity and convince parents and other stakeholders that they are supporting STEM learning?
STEM surrounds us, but the key element that distinguishes STEM in a children’s museum is intentionality. When museum staff and volunteers make connections to the STEM in a mirror, a pile of stones, a child’s scooter, or a texture wall, they transform these items into STEM exhibits. For example, a museum educator reading the “Three Little Pigs” to a child parent group can easily turn the story experience into a STEM learning experience by asking children about the strength of various materials used to build the three houses (which of course has a big effect on whether the house will “blow down”). They can ask children about wind, the ways that they have experienced it or whether they have ever seen a tree blown over after a storm. By taking a STEM habits-of-mind approach, the educator could also discuss how experiments, teamwork, and communication could have affected the outcome of the story.
Another important way that museums can foster STEM learning is to encourage caregivers to take activities, games, concepts, and STEM habits of mind home from a museum visit. When adults engage their children in simple STEM activities (“What do you think made that burrow in our lawn?”) or daily activities (“Let’s bake some cookies together, and you can measure out two cups of flour.”), they are building STEM literacy through content, skills, and habits of mind. Celebrating moments like these during their museum visit or modeling how child-directed inquiry and play can lead to STEM learning can empower caregivers to build STEM literacy with their young learners.
Take a look at your exhibits with STEM glasses on. Observe how children and caregivers use the exhibits and materials. In what ways can you highlight STEM learning that is already happening? How can you make small (or big!) changes to enhance STEM learning? Dramatic play areas are rich with opportunities for STEM learning, as children are already engaging in narratives that help them make sense of the world and develop self-regulation, collaboration, and perspective taking—important skills for the STEM field and beyond. Play areas such as grocery stores encourage math skills (order of operations, balancing equations, dividing resources). Veterinary clinic or farm exhibits can open conversations about animal behavior and traits, and medical clinic exhibits can prompt questions about the human body.
Light, magnetism, and air are examples of physical science content often found in children’s museums that can be explored through cause and effect. Understanding causal relationships leads to experimentation, creative use of materials, finding solutions, or making models.
Art studios and makerspaces provide interesting mediums for using STEM concepts and skills. Approaching art and STEM simultaneously, rather than as separate entities, creates additional entry points for learning. Capillary action is a great example of science content that can be authentically explored through art using primary colored markers, coffee filters, and water: a true STEAM activity.
Importantly, it is not necessary to be a scientist or engineer to develop good STEM programming at a children’s museum! It is far more important to be comfortable with the processes of STEM and confident in helping children and adults explore together. Exhibits and programming can be very simple: open-ended activities that promote trial-and-error experimentation work well in almost any setting. The best exhibits often have no right answer. Designing activities where children and adults can freely try alternatives and discuss the outcomes generates authentic co-learning moments.
There are still many barriers to STEM learning for young children, whether it’s a lack of science identity among adult caregivers, persisting social biases (across gender, socioeconomic status, or race), or an increase in screen time leading to a decrease in outdoor play. Many community members have limited access to high quality STEM programming, which is why it is critical to embrace the work children’s museums already do to advance STEM and be thoughtful in how to make these experiences inclusive and accessible to all. Children’s museums already play an important role as conveners in their STEM communities. They can also serve as resources for adults and children within networks of early learning organizations (preschools, libraries, Boys & Girls clubs, etc.). In doing, our field can pave the path for embracing STEM as a process and as a way of learning about the world.
Charlie Trautmann, formerly a children’s science center director and ACM board member, is a visiting scholar at Cornell University’s Department of Human Development. Janna Doherty is program manager of early childhood programs at the Museum of Science, Boston.
To read other articles in the “STEM” issue of Hand to Hand, subscribe today. ACM members also receive both digital and printed complimentary copies of Hand to Hand. ACM members can access their copies through the Digital Resource Library. Contact Membership@ChildrensMuseums.org to gain access if needed.
By Amelia Chapman
This summer’s 50th anniversary of humans first setting foot on the Moon is a celebration of exploration, teamwork, innovation, imagination, STEM, and discovery—topics embraced by children’s museums every day. Use NASA’s free resources to join in the anniversary excitement and build awareness of your year-round opportunities!
Be Mission Control
Establish your museum as a place the community can gather to celebrate the anniversary, and learn for the future. Invite local media to do their anniversary stories from your galleries or events, offer to do on-air science demos like making craters, and share experiments people can try at home. Be sure to submit your events to NASA’s anniversary map and calendar!
Looking for some easy ways to add “space” to your galleries? Hang up NASA posters; set a screen to show beautiful ViewSpace interactives and videos; turn your maker space into a rover design center; create a scale model of our Solar System; or put a 3D printer to work. You can also use an empty wall to display adults’ memories of the Moon landing and kids’ visions for future exploration—and let them know about this art contest (to enter, register by June 1 and submit artwork by June 15)!
Engage the Whole Crew
Team up with a local history department to host an oral history day where kids interview relatives about their Moon landing memories. Involve the whole community and create a time capsule to open fifty years in the future. Use the Night Sky Network to connect with local astronomy clubs that can bring telescopes, hands-on demos and enthusiastic astronomers to your site. Invite a Solar System Ambassador to share the latest science and discoveries of NASA’s missions.
Celebrate teamwork with all-ages activities like this Trip to Mars game that gives everyone a job to do. Challenge your summer campers to build a space colony or put on a Space School Musical. Point families to NASA Space Place, a great place for them to keep learning together.
Launch a Celebration
Have a Moon-filled day of fun! Hide and Seek Moon is great for young learners; after learning about why the Moon seems to change shape, families can work together to make a Moon phases calendar and calculator. Check out this list of more lunar fun from STAR_Net and pre-k astronomy activities from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Plan ahead for next time and learn how to borrow actual lunar and meteorite samples from NASA for hands-on teaching.
Saturday, July 20 is the day of the landing, but that’s not the only event or day to celebrate! On July 16, be part of the Global Rocket Launch Challenge with rocket activities for all ages. Or, celebrate the crew’s safe return to our home planet on July 24 with activities such as making observations that help scientists study the Earth.
Use the Momentum!
The Apollo anniversaries aren’t just a chance to look back. NASA’s upcoming Moon to Mars program will have humans returning to the Moon as a gateway forward to Mars. Celebrate the Red Planet by printing out some coloring sheets and panoramic images, or screening these fun Mars in a Minute videos.
Make plans for October’s International Observe the Moon Night and April 22, 2020 – the 50th anniversary of Earth Day! After all, it’s no mere coincidence Earth Day began during the Apollo missions—they let us see our home planet in a new way. Print out some Apollo-Earth Day posters here.
Finally, become part of NASA’s Museum Alliance, a community of practice providing professional development and NASA resources to informal educators who want to use the excitement of space exploration and scientific discovery to inspire new generations.
Amelia Chapman is an education program specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Many children’s museums around the world have mascots that represent their museum’s mission, history, and sense of fun. We talked to eleven ACM members about what their mascots mean to them.
When Buell Children’s Museum was first founded, the name of the museum was P.A.W.S., for Pueblo Art Works. The dog theme originated from the idea of paws. Sparky the Art Dog has a black spot in the shape of a heart, and he loves reading and birthday parties!
Moe Monster was imagined by the Children’s Museum of Houston in 2013 with the idea of a quirky character who embodied childlike qualities—fierce and free spirited; unique but relatable; and with a willingness to take on the world head on! Moe Monster first made an appearance as an animated character during the Children’s Museum of Houston “Summer of Epic Adventure” commercial in 2013.
Mary is short for “mariposa”—Spanish for “butterfly.” Inspired by Mary, the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County uses the lifecycle of a butterfly woven throughout the exhibits in their outdoor space, Mary’s Garden. The museum has evolved from a small, volunteer-only mobile museum to a medium size children’s museum—and Mary’s lifecycle supports their evolution as they continue to grow. Every year, the museum sets up a small voting booth and holds elections for President of Mary’s Garden. This encourages children and families to engage in their communities, stay informed, and (most importantly) learn the process of voting and how important it is.
The name is a combination of two words: Kid and Doodle. Kidoodle was designed to be inclusive with the hope that everyone could see themselves in Kidoodle, and to showcase the museum’s playful, creative, and fun spirit. The colors of the museum’s logo and the Kidoodle shape were chosen with the help of children who identified green, purple, and pink as their favorite crayons to draw with. Kidoodle was introduced at the museum’s groundbreaking in October 2008, and has been serving as the museum’s ambassador ever since! Right now, a plush Kidoodle is traveling Germany with one of the museum’s play guides who is studying there (@prairieplaysd).
Gnarkles was created by Ben Brown for the museum in 2009. Gnarkles isn’t one specific thing, and can be interpreted to be something different based on the perspective you have! His name was chosen from a local contest. Gnarkles is completely created from kitchen pots, pans, and utensils!
Geo is made up of colorful 3-D shapes forming a person. He represents a playful spirit, based in an educational foundation. Geo stands outside the museum in statue on top of a podium scaling around ten feet tall! He also is in the museum’s logo and represents the museum’s brand to their community.
The museum didn’t choose Bessie—Bessie chose the museum! Visitors like to climb, sit on, paint, wash, and hug Bessie. She stands at the front of the museum’s property, and children love to look for her as they pass by in their parents’ care to see what hat she is wearing that day!
Before Discovery Place Kids opened in Huntersville, the museum worked to develop Can Can as a physical representation of the spirit of their efforts to create a children’s museum. Can Can was developed as someone children could identify with. To this day, the mascot represents the personality of Discovery Place Kids, now in two locations. Both Discovery Place Kids museums have an overall focus of encouraging children to believe in themselves, evidenced in the exhibitions all being named “I CAN …,” which is how Can Can was named!
The Wooly Mammoth is the Alaskan State Fossil. The museum has an enormous chicken wire Wooly Mammoth sculpture, made by local artist Lacie Stewing, that visitors are encouraged to tie yarn to as a collaborative art project!
The mascot was born as part of Please Touch Museum’s rebrand in May 2018 and was unveiled in October 2018 through a PTM Birthday Bash. Squiggles’ name was chosen in a citywide naming contest with more than 1,400 creative entries. As part of the museum’s commitment to inclusivity, Squiggles is gender non-binary and referred to using the pronouns they, their, and them.
Wilbur is based on the sun in the museum’s logo. He was created to serve as the mascot for their grocery store in the Farm to Market exhibit. The museum wanted a fun and whimsical mascot who would make people smile just looking at it. Another goal was to replicate a mascot kids might see in a real grocery store, adding a level of reality to the imaginary play happening in the exhibit. In April 2019, the museum is continuing their 30th anniversary celebration with a campaign called “Where’s Wilbur?” Wilbur will hide in the museum every day, and children who find him will get their photo with Wilbur on our photo wall.
Thanks to Buell Children’s Museum, Children’s Museum of Houston, Children’s Museum of Sonoma County, Children’s Museum of South Dakota, Children’s Museum of Tacoma, The Children’s Museum of the Upstate, Discovery Museum, Discovery Place, Fairbanks Children’s Museum, Please Touch Museum, and Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City for sharing their stories!
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter and Facebook.
This post first appeared on Kidspace Children’s Museum’s blog on March 19, 2019.
By Michael Shanklin
Museums Advocacy Day 2019 took place February 25-26 in Washington, DC. A new Congress convened facing an enormous list of timely policy debates, including support for museums.
In the museum field, we must keep making our case. Beyond federal funding, museums are significantly impacted by tax reform, education policy, infrastructure legislation, and more. Legislators do not know how museums are impacted if they don’t hear directly from us—the museums and people they represent.
Kidspace CEO Michael Shanklin, along with many of our colleagues from AAM (American Alliance of Museums) and CAM (California Association of Museums), set out for Washington DC to advocate for our museums! He met with the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and six Members of Congress. We spoke with Michael after his trip to find out what this event means to him for the greater good of all museums across the country.
“As someone who has been to Washington, DC, a number of times on business and personal travel, I had never taken part in efforts to advocate on behalf of museums, zoos, and aquaria. After receiving excellent training from the American Alliance of Museums, 300+ advocates met with their elected officials where our individual and collective voices were heard. Congressional staff members were so excited to meet with us, receive our appreciation for their hard work, and hear our requests to support our field. It was exciting to take part in our national political system. While we all know we are not perfect, we still have an amazing process and it was meaningful to be a part of that process.
“There were a number of highlights that I experienced while taking part in the American Alliance of Museums’ Advocacy Day. The first was the California delegation met with Senator Dianne Feinstein’s legislative aide who was bright and enthusiastic. He expressed gratitude for our collective efforts to visit with their office and share our support for museums. He also asked us to keep his office updated on California legislation that impacts museums as the Senator often looks to the California State Legislature for positive bills that she might introduce at the federal level.
“Another exciting moment was when we went into the Capitol building to meet with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s team. It was a very busy day on Capitol Hill and we did not have much time with her team, but they were clearly supportive of our efforts to advocate on behalf of museums across the nation. They shared that there was wonderful bipartisan support for museums.
“One final highlight was as I met with the eight California Congressional offices on my list, which involved eight miles of walking to and from offices, it was fun to see the pride of California represented in the various districts. I saw LA Dodgers logos, artwork from Californians, and local civic pride. It reminded me that our differences as United States citizens are what make us strong.” – Michael Shanklin, 2019
Are you inspired and wondering what you can do? Learn about advocating for museums here: YES, You Can Advocate!
Michael Shanklin is CEO of Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena, California. Follow Kidspace Children’s Museum on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Pictured clockwise from top left: Brooklyn Children’s Museum (1899), Boston Children’s Museum (1913), The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (1925), and Detroit Children’s Museum (1917)
The following post appears in the “History and Culture Summit” issue of Hand to Hand, ACM’s quarterly journal.
By Jessie Swigger, PhD
In the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century, four museums for children opened in the United States: Brooklyn Children’s Museum (1899), Boston Children’s Museum (1913), the Detroit Children’s Museum (1917), and The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (1925). These four museums—opened by different individuals and groups in different places and at different times—were linked by more than their shared focus on young audiences.
First, they were all shaped by the progressive education movement, which was then at the height of its power and influence. Second, at each museum, women played significant leadership roles (which was unusual in the museum profession, or anywhere). Many of these women knew one another and created a new professional network for their particular brand of museum work. Reflecting on the origin stories of these pioneer children’s museums sheds light on current trends and directions in the children’s museum movement.
Brooklyn Children’s Museum (BCM) opened in 1899, less than one year after Brooklyn became a borough of New York City. The museum originally operated under the umbrella of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (BIAS), then in the process of moving into a new and much larger building under construction on Eastern Parkway. The children’s museum opened just a few blocks away in what was known as the Adams House in Bedford Park (now Brower Park) in Crown Heights.
BCM was open to the public, free of charge, and sought to provide young people with an introduction to the natural sciences that supported the “various classwork of the public schools,” particularly along the “lines of nature study.” The BIAS Annual Report of 1901-1902 included a special invitation to teachers encouraging them to draw on the museum’s resources when developing “class work in nature-study.” This focus on nature study is perhaps unsurprising—New York’s recently appointed superintendent of public schools, William Henry Maxwell, was an advocate for nature study in the curriculum.
The nature study movement, part of the increasingly popular progressive education movement, encouraged young people to learn by observing and interacting with the natural world. Historian Sally Gregory Kohlstedt explains that “at the core of nature study was a pragmatic insistence on using local objects for study emphasizing the connection between those objects and human experience.” It was particularly popular in urban areas, where progressives feared the lack of contact with nature in America’s growing cities would be detrimental to the Americanization of newly-arrived immigrants.
In 1902, Anna Billings Gallup, a teacher, nature study advocate, and recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined BAIS as an “assistant” at the children’s museum. Two years later she was named curator-in-chief. At a time when few women held significant positions in museums, Gallup was a pioneer.
Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s collections certainly reflected a commitment to nature study, but they also addressed the wide range of childhood interests and the breadth of the public school curriculum. Inside BCM, children found collections illustrating zoology, botany, U.S. history, mineralogy, geography, and art. Gallup explained in an article for Popular Science that the exhibits were “attractive in appearance, simple in arrangement, and labeled with descriptions adapted to the needs of children, printed in clear readable type.”
Gallup’s work was well recognized by her peers. In 1907, she was one of five women who attended the Second Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums (AAM) in Pittsburg, PA, where she presented a paper titled “The Work of a Children’s Museum.” For the next thirty-four years, Gallup and her staff worked to expand the museum’s collection and physical presence.
Delia I. Griffin was one of the other women attending the 1907 AAM meeting, where she presented her paper, “The Educational Work of a Small Museum.” At the time, she was director of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, VT. Like Gallup, Griffin was trained in nature study techniques and had even produced a pamphlet titled Outline of Nature Study for Primary and Grammar Grades. At St. Johnsbury, she created lesson plans in nature study at the museum for local public schools. Griffin and Gallup became friendly, and when a second museum for children opened in Boston, Gallup recommended Griffin for the job of curator.
In 1909, members of Boston’s Science Teachers’ Bureau began building a collection of natural history objects that could be used in public school classrooms. By 1913, the bureau had founded the second children’s museum in the United States, the Boston Children’s Museum. Like Brooklyn Children’s Museum, it was housed in a former mansion. Located at Pine Bank in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood, the museum offered children access to ethnographic, natural history, and historical collections. Griffin would later write that the goal of the children’s museum was to train the “plastic minds of children to observe accurately and think logically.”
In 1917, the Detroit Museum of Art, undergoing its own growth, opened a children’s museum, with yet another woman at the helm. Gertrude A. Gillmore, a supervising teacher of the Martindale Normal School, was appointed curator. She explained that the museum’s purpose would be “two-fold: to loan illustrative material to the schools and to attract the children to the Museum through monthly exhibits appealing directly to their interests.”
In 1919, Gillmore reflected on the Detroit Children’s Museum’s (DCM) progress in a report. Like Brooklyn and Boston, the museum’s work developed in tandem with that of public schools. While the collection was drawn from the Detroit Museum of Art’s holdings, the children’s museum reported, “in general our policy has been not to organize material as a collection until a wish for it has been expressed.” This approach meant that collections were created in response to requests from public school teachers in an even more direct way than at Brooklyn and Boston. By 1919, the children’s museum had hosted exhibits on the “History of Detroit,” “Common Birds and Mammals of Michigan,” and several exhibits on “phases of art of interest to children.” In 1927, the Detroit Museum of Art changed its name to the Detroit Institute of Arts and moved to a new and larger building on Woodward Avenue. Two years earlier, the DCM had been placed directly under the Detroit Board of Education. The Detroit Children’s Museum found a new home in a building type that was now a familiar one to children’s museums—a former mansion—the Farr Residence at 96 Putnam in Detroit.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis opened in 1925. Discussions about children and museums had begun two years before, when the Indianapolis Progressive Educational Association (PEA) held its first meeting at the Orchard Country Day School. Founded in 1922, the Orchard School was a fitting location for the meeting. The curriculum followed Marietta Pierce Johnson’s “Organic School Model.” Johnson drew from progressive educator and philosopher John Dewey’s ideas about learning by doing. Two of the school’s nine founders were Martha Carey and Mary Carey Appel, daughters of wealthy socialite Mary Stewart Carey. In fact, Mary Stewart Carey had donated her home and apple orchard for the cause.
There were several items on the PEA agenda, but most pressing was a desire to make the museum collections housed in the Statehouse available to the city’s public school children. Faye Henley, newly appointed director of the Orchard School, argued, “The material should be put into traveling cases and sent around to the schools.”
Mary Stewart Carey may not have been at this meeting, but it’s quite likely that she knew about the Indianapolis PEA and their conversation given her association with the Orchard School.
The next year, Mary Stewart Carey visited Brooklyn Children’s Museum while on vacation in nearby Asbury Park, NJ. Soon, she was on her way to the Adams House. When she returned to Indianapolis, she was determined to create a similar institution in her hometown.
Carey was well positioned for this kind of endeavor. Her philanthropic activities expanded beyond the recently founded Orchard School. For example, she played a key role in selecting the Indiana state flag in 1917, and was a member of the Indianapolis Woman’s Club and the Art Association of Indiana. Carey’s connections would prove useful in garnering support and resources for the museum.
Soon, an organizational committee was formed with Carey at the helm. They quickly formalized their commitment to creating a museum centered on their intended audience rather than a collection, writing that “the viewpoint of the child should be considered in providing for the equipment and installation of all materials.” Over the next few months, the museum wrote a constitution, elected a board of trustees, and began developing partnerships with the local public schools and with clubs for children.
The museum board had members and interest, but they lacked the funding to purchase a collection. So, the board called on the local community to donate objects they believed would educate children. Museum lore claims that the first donated objects were a few arrowheads that Carey’s grandchildren had found and given to her. They received an overwhelming response from community members. One woman tried to donate a live alligator, perhaps knowing the Brooklyn Children’s Museum included a live animal collection, but the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis turned it down. While its sister institutions had solicited collections from established sources, such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the children’s museum was the first to directly invite the community to participate in the creation of the collection.
In July 1925, the museum found its first home when the board rented a carriage house behind the Propylaeum, the city’s women’s literary society. By November, the board hired E.Y. Guernsey as curator. Guernsey was formerly an archaeologist for the Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles and at the Spring Mill State Park in Mitchell, Indiana. When Guernsey oversaw the museum’s first opening to public school classes the following month, there were no cases. Instead, the objects were placed on tables, out in the open.
Two years later, primarily due to high rent, the museum moved out of its first carriage house home and into Carey’s former home on North Meridian, where children visited a larger collection distributed among themed rooms that included the Geology Gallery, the Natural Science Gallery, and the Pioneer Gallery.
The four museums discussed here were created more than 100 years ago, but their origin stories raise questions for the contemporary movement. Each museum had strong links to the progressive education movement and to public schools. In many ways, the first four children’s museums saw themselves as partners with public schools. How do current children’s museums work with schools, and how do they view their relationship with them? Second, women played a central role in founding each museum. As an extension of the public schools, where a majority of the teachers were women, it was acceptable for women to take on the role of curator or director of a children’s museum. These women formed an unofficial but important network as they shared ideas about how best to do children’s museum work. Do women continue to play a larger role in the children’s museum profession than in other fields, or has this changed over time? How has the presence of women from the very beginning impacted the approach of various children’s museums?
There are many other similarities that these first four museums shared. In studying the connections among Brooklyn, Boston, Detroit, and Indianapolis, we can learn more not only about the foundational history of children’s museums, but also about the current state of the field.
Jessie Swigger is the director of Western Carolina University’s Public History Program. She earned her MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to presenting at numerous regional and national conferences, her work has appeared in The Encyclopedia of Culture Wars and The 1980s: A Critical and Transitional Decade. In 2013, she received the North Carolina Museums Council Award of Special Recognition. Her award-winning book, History Is Bunk: Assembling the Past at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2014.
To read other articles in the “History & Culture Summit” issue of Hand to Hand, subscribe today. ACM members receive both digital and printed complimentary copies of Hand to Hand. ACM members can access their copies through the Online Member Resource Library–contact Membership@ChildrensMuseums.org to gain access.
The following post appears in the January 2019 issue of Hand to Hand, ACM’s quarterly journal.
By Ruth G. Shelly
Museums that run preschools or elementary schools often have more than just physical walls separating these operations. Museums and schools have vastly different schedules, revenue streams, licensing requirements, and staffing issues. Often the school is seen as a “program of” the umbrella museum operation. But what if the organization’s learning approach were the umbrella—and the museum, school, and professional development initiatives were all considered laboratories for developing and disseminating that learning approach? Portland Children’s Museum is moving in that direction.
For children’s museums considering a preschool and/or elementary school, here are some of our lessons learned.
Portland Children’s Museum was founded in 1946 as a program of Portland Parks and Recreation. Its first home was an 1861 mansion, followed by a 1918 nurses’ dormitory, which the museum quickly outgrew. In 2001, Rotary Club of Portland raised $10 million to move the museum to the former home of Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, a mid-century brick building left empty when OMSI relocated to a much larger facility.
Although the old science center was far from glamorous, the children’s museum felt it had landed in paradise—with far more room, generous parking, and the verdant surroundings of Washington Park. The museum separated from Portland Parks and became its own private nonprofit. Parks remained the museum’s landlord as owner of the building—offering a generous thirty-year lease for $10, baseline utilities, and modest capital repairs.
In the same period as the museum’s 2001 move, two other events converged: Oregon passed legislation allowing the formation of charter schools, and educator Judy Graves returned from a trip to the preschools of Reggio Emilia in Italy, determined to start her own school inspired by the Reggio approach. All she needed was space, of which the children’s museum suddenly had an abundance. Judy and museum director Verne Stanford collaborated to co-locate the children’s museum and new charter school, both based on playful learning. Opal School opened its doors to its first class of students in September 2001 as a museum program.
Thus Portland Children’s Museum and Opal School “fell into place” under the unexpected constellation of real estate, Oregon law, and an inspiring trip to Italy. This fortunate coincidence sparked the children’s museum/school relationship that has evolved, somewhat through trial and error, over the past seventeen years. We now run a tuition-based, private beginning school for thirty-seven preschoolers, and a public charter elementary school for eighty-eight students grades K-5. We have recently seen our inaugural students graduate from college.
A children’s museum considering a school today has the benefit of learning from the experience of organizations like Portland Children’s Museum and Opal School. Is the intent of a new school mission-driven, or is it the prospect of an additional revenue stream? If the latter, think carefully, because there may be bumps in the road ahead.
While on the surface, a children’s museum and preschool or elementary school seem like a natural fit, there are significant cultural and operational differences that can be mitigated with careful planning. Advance agreements can help alleviate tension later on. Consider:
The above list gives pause, and it should. However, the partnership of students learning in a museum environment, and contributing back to improve that environment, is a great return on investment.
At Portland Children’s Museum, students in Opal School have become active collaborators. We find no better place to engage children’s creativity and spread their ideas than in our museum exhibits. After all, the most effective children’s exhibits are informed by children themselves. Our exhibit designers work with classroom teachers so that concept exploration becomes a class project incorporated into the curriculum.
For example, in creating The Market, our students dreamed of illustrating the relationship between land and food. The result includes a grape arbor, apple tree, beehive, and chicken coop, which students drew out as a full-size floor plan in our exhibits staging area.
To develop our forthcoming water exhibit, Drip City, we collaborated with Opal School students as well as museum visitors, students at the nearby Native Montessori Preschool at the Faubion School Early Learning Center, and other diverse community members. Opal School students explored the concept of watershed, took a field trip to the source of Portland’s water, and diagrammed their understanding in drawings that will become part of the final exhibit.
While Opal students do not regularly visit the museum every school day, many of them stay after school to play. Each student’s family can sign up for a play pass, free with enrollment, that allows them to play after school with their caregiver as long as they want, and to come on weekends and holidays free.
Portland Children’s Museum and Opal School’s relationship began as convenient co-location, supported by a common commitment to learning through play. Over time, it has matured into a unified learning philosophy called Playful Inquiry, based on five principles:
We now consider the museum, Opal School, and our professional development offerings as laboratories for developing and disseminating this learning approach. We employ Playful Inquiry for informal learning with families in the museum, formal learning with students in the school, and professional learning with adult audiences through consultation, workshops, retreats, and symposiums. Topics offered to adult audiences include Equity and Access through Story, Supporting Social and Emotional Intelligence, and Constructing Collaborative and Courageous Learning Communities (For a complete list of offerings, see here.) In the process, literal and figurative walls are becoming more porous. In contrast to seeing ourselves as united under one physical roof, we see ourselves united in practicing and experimenting with the same learning approach, just in different settings with different audiences.
To be sure, it’s a work in progress. Even after seventeen years, or perhaps because of that long history, there are ongoing challenges to resolve. For example, as the organization grows and space becomes more precious, which program (museum, school, or professional development) takes priority? However, whether staff members work in the museum, the school, professional development, or core mission support, we remember we all use the same learning approach to work with each other. By nurturing empathy for different perspectives, seeking connections in our work, sharing stories of success and failure, remaining curious about potential solutions, and exploring playfully together, we employ our learning approach to blur the boundaries between museum and school, which are united in a singular mission:
To develop innovative problem-solvers through playful learning experiences that strengthen relationships between children and their world.
Ruth Shelly has served as the executive director of Portland Children’s Museum and its associated Opal School and Museum Center for Learning in Portland, Oregon, since 2013. Prior to this Shelly was the executive director of the Madison Children’s Museum in Wisconsin.
To read other articles in the “Museum Schools + Preschools” issue of Hand to Hand, subscribe today. ACM members also receive both digital and printed complimentary copies of Hand to Hand. ACM members can access their copies through the Online Member Resource Library–contact Membership@ChildrensMuseums.org to gain access.
By David Robinson
Exhibit and education coordinators and other children’s museum staff often face a challenging assignment: creating an exhibit or activity that captures the interest of young people and offers a positive learning experience.
The 14th annual Endangered Species Day on May 17, 2019 provides children’s museums with an opportunity to highlight their educational programs and overall mission while also recognizing this nationwide celebration.
First approved by the U.S. Senate in 2006, the purpose of Endangered Species Day is to expand awareness about endangered species and habitat conservation and to share success stories of species recovery. Every year, museums, schools, zoos, aquariums, botanic gardens, conservation groups, parks, wildlife refuges and other locations hold Endangered Species Day events throughout the country.
There are several ways that children’s museums can observe Endangered Species Day on May 17 or another convenient time in May:
Prepare an exhibit. You could modify an existing display or organize a new one. This can feature dioramas, animal replicas, photos and artwork of endangered species and local habitats, books and other material as part of a temporary exhibit. The Endangered Species Day website includes a variety of resources, including a series of infographics that you can easily adapt to meet space limitations and other requirements. Even those museums that already have a full schedule of exhibits and other programs should be able to add a day or weeklong activity.
Invite a speaker. You can also invite a local expert from the Audubon Society or other group to speak about the actions people can take to help protect endangered animals and plants.
Offer specific children’s activities. Popular examples include a reading hour, an art table, bat box building, and milkweed seed bomb making (for monarch butterfly gardens). You can also invite people to take an animal tracking quiz—you can find one for your state by contacting the Department of Fish & Game or Department of Natural Resources (like these examples from Maine and Minnesota).
Engage your visitors. Encourage children (and adults) to express themselves about endangered species, their favorite animals, and what people can do to help. They can add their comments to a poster board or table journal. This may be the first time that many young people have talked about endangered species. Of course, it’s essential to highlight the positive, so be sure to emphasize the success stories of species recovery and that individuals can and do make a difference in protecting imperiled species.
Expand promotion. In addition to regular museum member outreach, share details of your exhibit/activity on the Endangered Species Day event directory or send the details to me (drobinson@endangered.org).
The Endangered Species Day website (www.endangeredspeciesday.org) features a variety of resources, including event planning information; a reading list; a series of infographics about endangered species conservation, actions people can take, and the Endangered Species Act; and color/activity sheets, masks, bookmarks, stickers and other material. Many of these can be downloaded and printed for use at your activity.
David Robinson is Endangered Species Day Director at Endangered Species Coalition. Learn more at www.endangeredspeciesday.org.
Led by the Association of Children’s Museums and the University of Washington’s Museology Graduate Program, the Children’s Museum Research Network (CMRN) formed in 2015 with funding from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. For the past year, CMRN has contributed an article to each issue of Hand to Hand to disseminate their findings with the field. The following article was shared in the Summer/Fall 2017 issue, “History & Culture Summit.” Stay tuned to the blog for more articles from CMRN!
By Kari Ross Nelson and Alix Tonsgard
In the previous issue of Hand to Hand, Suzy Letourneau and Nicole Rivera described the Children’s Museum Research Network’s (CMRN) study of how children’s museums conceptualize play and its role in their missions. This study showed that while children’s museums strongly value play as important to their missions and as a mechanism for learning, few defined play or how it leads to learning in a formal way within their institutions. Sharing these findings at InterActivity 2017 in Pasadena, California, sparked discussion about defining play and how a definition might impact our work.
The purpose of this article is to explore the practical application of a clearly-stated and understood definition of play. To this end, we spoke with staff from two children’s museums that have their own definitions of play to see how this plays out on a day-to-day, practical level: Barbara Hahn, vice president of development at Minnesota Children’s Museum (MCM), and Jessica Neuwirth, exhibit developer at Providence Children’s Museum.
Both Minnesota Children’s Museum and Providence Children’s Museum built their definitions from studying the research on play. Importantly, each museums qualifies its definition of play with specific adjectives that distinguish it from other types of play, place it in a position of respect, and convey the importance of play as related to learning. Providence specifies “free play”; MCM calls it “powerful play.”
As Hahn says, “You can ‘play’ soccer or you can ‘play’ a video game—both are very achievement-oriented. Our term, ‘powerful play,’ refers to play that is captivating and fun, active and challenging, and self-directed and open-ended. In action, that means children are having a good time, showing interest, moving and thinking, and exploring freely—choosing what they want to do and how to do it. Crafting this definition was a necessary exercise to get clear on what we’re all about, what we’re proposing, and how it’s valuable to children.”
That clarity works on multiple levels for the museums, both internally and externally. Within the museums, the definitions of play provide filters and focus—criteria against which they can evaluate everything they do. Their definitions of play are front and center in the design of museum experiences. For example, Providence’s “free play” definition describes play as freely-chosen, personally-directed, intrinsically-motivated, and involving active engagement. Neuwirth compares program and exhibit design concepts against these standards throughout the exhibit or program development process. Can a child immediately figure out what an exhibit is about and jump into it without adult intervention and without signage? Is the play personally directed? Is the child actively engaged, or is an educator teaching something while the child sits and passively receives information? Realistically, not every component will meet every criterion for every child, but across the museum, they can all be experienced.
A well-articulated definition of play also helps communicate the institution’s deeply held values to new staff. “When we have interdepartmental meetings about developing new programs, new exhibits, or other integrated projects, the definition is central to talking about what these new initiatives will look like,” says Neuwirth. “This helps to get everyone on the same page.”
Neuwirth points out that with small budgets and limited resources, practitioners need to be able to direct themselves and their museum in the most effective way and use what they have well. “Our definition (of play) deploys our resources well, all in the name of a big idea.”
Because Providence’s definition of play centers the child as director of their own play, self-motivated and active as well, Neuwirth believes that “our exhibits are designed to have multiple entry-points, many ways to proceed with playing, and no set outcome. This allows all users to follow their own interests, work at levels that feel appropriate to them, and define their own outcomes. Our exhibits tend to be more process-oriented, and less about teaching specific content.”
Definitions of play further serve an important role in communicating outside the museums. Not everyone understands or shares the passion for the power of play. MCM describes what goes on in their museum as “Powerful Play.” According to Hahn, the use of the word “powerful” serves to “call attention to play and gives it the respect it deserves and doesn’t always get.” Not only is this an important distinction to communicate to funders and media, but also caregivers. By placing special emphasis on communicating their definition of play with parenting adults, MCM shares tools and language for thinking about the different types and values of play.
Both Hahn and Neuwirth see benefits to an institution-specific definition of play, without feeling that a definition limits what they do. “When we’re designing exhibits or programs, as museum staff, we want to be able to speak from one place,” says Neuwirth, “and that’s what this definition is about. We’re not telling people what they have to believe, we’re saying this is what we do here and what why we do it.”
A field-wide, shared definition of play may not be reasonable, considering the variety of community-specific children’s museums responding to different audiences and needs. Some worry that a definition of play could stifle creativity, which is contrary to the essence of play. In some circles, the word “play” itself implies the trivial, unimportant, or superficial, and is avoided. Nevertheless, the two museums mentioned here demonstrate that having a clear definition of play, on an institutional level, can strengthen a museum’s work and facilitate communication around play to stakeholders. In turn, as more children’s museums establish clear definitions, their work can contribute to the broader, field-wide understanding of play as it relates to learning in all children’s museums.
| DuPage Digs Deeper An agreed-upon definition of play may also carry an impact beyond the field of children’s museums. Two studies completed by CMRN inspired the development of a study at DuPage Children’s Museum called Parental Perceptions of Play and Learning. Focus groups and surveys were used to gain an understanding of parents’ beliefs about play and learning. Of particular interest in this process were the focus group discussions about the tensions and pressures experienced by both adults and children as a result of academic and social stressors—a tension widely experienced by early childhood educators as well. In the current climate of our education system, the association of the word play with “fun” seems to devalue its power to support learning and development. With work underway on behalf of CMRN as well as within institutions such as Providence Children’s Museum, Minnesota Children’s Museum, and DuPage Children, which are conducting research and positioning themselves as champions for play, there may be potential to stimulate a broader level of conversation and action, both within the children’s museum field and beyond. |
Kari Ross Nelson is research and evaluation associate at Thanksgiving Point Institute. Alix Tonsgard is early learning specialist at DuPage Children’s Museum.
The recent partial federal government shutdown was the longest in U.S. history, with 800,000 federal employees furloughed or working without pay. Many ACM members around the country offered discounted and free admission to families affected by the shutdown. This list has been updated as of 11:00 a.m. EST on February 1, 2019.
Alabama
EarlyWorks Children’s Museum (Huntsville, AL) – more info here.
Alaska
Fairbanks Children’s Museum (Fairbanks, AK) – more info here.
Arizona
Children’s Museum of Phoenix (Phoenix, AZ) – more info here.
California
Bay Area Discovery Museum (Sausalito, CA) – more info here. Says the museum, “We recognize that many furloughed employees are still impacted by the shutdown as they wait for back pay, and so are continuing to offer free admission.”
Habitot Children’s Museum (Berkeley, CA) – more info here.
The Lawrence Hall of Science (Berkeley, CA) – more info here.
The New Children’s Museum (San Diego, CA) offered free admission on January 12-13, 2019.
Paso Robles Children’s Museum (Paso Robles, CA) – more info here.
Colorado
WOW! Children’s Museum (Lafayette, CO) – more info here.
Connecticut
Stepping Stones Museum for Children (Norwalk, CT) is hosting a free event for impacted federal workers and their families, including free admission and pizza, on January 30, 2019. More info here.
Florida
Glazer Children’s Museum (Tampa, FL) – more info here.
MOSI (Tampa, FL) – more info here.
Museum of Discovery and Science (Fort Lauderdale, FL) – from the museum: “The Museum of Discovery and Science will offer free admission to furloughed federal workers for the duration of the shutdown. Government employees must present a valid government I.D. at the box office. Admission is good for a total of 2 family members. Admission is for exhibits only.”
Illinois
Children’s Discovery Museum (Normal, IL) will offer free admission from January 26-27, 2019. More info here.
The Children’s Museum in Oak Lawn (Oak Lawn, IL) – $3 admission through February 1, more info here.
Edwardsville Children’s Museum (Edwardsville, IL) – more info here.
Kohl Children’s Museum (Glenview, IL) – more info here.
Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum (Peoria, IL) – from the museum: “The Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum and the Owens Recreation Center invite Federal Employees impacted by the budget shutdown, along with members of their immediate families, to visit the museum and ice rink without paid admission for the duration of the government shutdown.” Said Director Rebecca Shulman Herz, “We recognize that many families in Peoria are impacted by the Federal Government shut down. We are pleased to offer opportunities for free family fun and learning during this difficult time.”
Indiana
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (Indianapolis, IN) – through March 10, more info here.
Terre Haute Children’s Museum (Terre Haute, IN) – more info here.
Kansas
The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center (Topeka, KS) – through January 31, more info here.
Wonderscope Children’s Museum of Kansas City (Shawnee, KS) will offer free admission on January 26-27. More info here.
Louisiana
Louisiana Children’s Museum (New Orleans, LA) – more info here.
Maine
Children’s Discovery Museum (Augusta, ME) – more info here.
Children’s Museum & Theatre of Maine (Portland, ME) – more info here.
Coastal Children’s Museum (Rockland, ME) – from the museum: “All federal employees and their immediate families are welcome to explore the Museum and leave their stress and worry behind, if only for a few fun-filled hours. A current government ID is all that is required at the front desk for free admission.”
Maryland
KID Museum (Bethesda, MD) – more info here.
Massachusetts
Boston Children’s Museum (Boston, MA) – more info here.
Cape Cod Children’s Museum (Mashpee, MA) – more info here.
The Children’s Museum of Greater Fall River (Fall River, MA)
Discovery Museum (Acton, MA) – more info here.
EcoTarium (Worcester, MA) – more info here.
Minnesota
Duluth Children’s Museum (Duluth, MN) – more info here.
Minnesota Children’s Museum (St. Paul, MN) – more info here.
Montana
Children’s Museum of Bozeman (Bozeman, MT) – more info here.
New Hampshire
Cheshire Children’s Museum (Keene, NH) – more info here.
Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (Dover, NH) – more info here.
New York
The Children’s Museum at Saratoga (Saratoga Springs, NY) – more info here.
The Children’s Museum of the Arts (New York, NY) – more info here.
Children’s Museum of the East End (Bridgehampton, NY) – more info here.
Long Island Children’s Museum (Garden City, NY) – through January 31, more info here. Said President Suzanne LeBlanc, “Long Island Children’s Museum is designed to be a place of respite where adults and children can escape everyday concerns, as they learn and play together. We know that many families in our community are facing financial hardships as paychecks are missed, and are grappling with childcare issues. We want to support these families and show our appreciation for the important work that they do for all of us.”
Mid-Hudson Children’s Museum (Poughkeepsie, NY) has been hosting “Pizza and Play” events for furloughed workers. Said Executive Director Lara Litchfield-Kimber, “When we first conceived the idea of hosting our Pizza and Play nights for furloughed workers, we wanted to provide an evening of normalcy for those federal employees impacted by the partial government shutdown.” More info here.
Sciencenter (Ithaca, NY) – $1 admission, more info here.
Staten Island Children’s Museum (Staten Island, NY) – more info here.
North Carolina
Discovery Place Kids – Huntersville (Huntersville, NC), Discovery Place Kids – Rockingham (Rockingham, NC), Discovery Place Nature (Charlotte, NC), and Discovery Place Science (Charlotte, NC) – more info here.
Ohio
COSI (Columbus, OH) – more info here.
Oregon
Portland Children’s Museum (Portland, OR) – through January 31, more info here. Said Executive Director Ruth Shelly, “The partial government shutdown has put an exceptional strain on families with young children. We at Portland Children’s Museum would like to offer a little respite from that stress by offering a free opportunity to come play and learn together.”
Pennsylvania
Bucks County Children’s Museum (New Hope, PA) – more info here.
South Carolina
Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry (Charleston, SC) – more info here.
The Sandbox: An Interactive Children’s Museum (Hilton Head Island, SC) – more info here.
South Dakota
Children’s Museum of South Dakota (Brookings, SD) – $1 admission, more info here.
Texas
Children’s Museum of Brownsville (Brownsville, TX) – more info here. Said Executive Director Felipe Peña III, “We understand that there has been a lot of uncertainty for a lot of these families as of late. Because of that, we’re extending this offer to all affected federal employees in hope that perhaps a day spent with family at the museum can provide at least a little ease and peace of mind.”
Children’s Museum of Houston (Houston, TX) and Fort Bend Children’s Discovery Center (Sugar Land, TX) – more info here.
Thinkery (Austin, TX) – more info here. Said Thinkery CEO Patricia Young Brown, “Maintaining affordable access for everyone is a top priority for Thinkery. We know the shutdown is putting a financial and emotional strain on workers and their families all over Central Texas. We hope that opening our doors to them until the shutdown ends creates an opportunity for those families to set aside those worries for a while and spend time playing and learning together.”
Tennessee
Creative Discovery Museum (Chattanooga, TN) – more info here. Said Executive Director Henry Schulson, “Creative Discovery Museum is committed to being accessible to all children and families. When situations arise that are difficult for families in our community, we do what we can to support them during that time.”
The Muse Knoxville (Knoxville, TN) – more info here.
Utah
Discovery Gateway Children’s Museum (Salt Lake City, UT) – more info here.
Virginia
Children’s Museum of Richmond – including all locations: Children’s Museum Downtown (Richmond, VA), Children’s Museum Short Pump (Richmond, VA), Children’s Museum Chesterfield (Midlothian, VA), and Children’s Museum Fredericksburg (Fredricksburg, VA), more info here.
Children’s Science Center (Fairfax, VA) – more info here.
Shenandoah Valley Discovery Museum (Winchester, VA) offered half price admission for federal workers and their families.
Washington
KidsQuest Children’s Museum (Bellevue, WA) – more info here.
West Virginia
Spark! Imagination and Science Center (Morgantown, WV) – from the museum: “The free admission offer is good for up to four people per federal employee from Friday, January 25, until the end of the partial government shutdown. Any federal employee currently not being paid because of the government shutdown (both furloughed, and those required to work without a paycheck) are eligible for this discount. To take advantage of this offer, guests must provide any form of federal employee ID.”
Wisconsin
Betty Brinn Children’s Museum (Milwaukee, WI) – more info here.
Madison Children’s Museum (Madison, WI) – $1 admission, more info here. Said President and CEO Deb Gilpin, “We want to do our part to make the museum accessible to these families during a stressful time. We know we can be a haven for families. If parents are now home with the kids unexpectedly and money is tight, we hope this helps them get out of the house to enjoy a day at the museum.”
Wyoming
Jackson Hole Children’s Museum (Jackson, WY)
Children’s museums have a long history of stepping up to support their communities in times of need. For families dealing with the stress of the shutdown, they offer a retreat for playful learning.
If we have missed your museum in our roundup in error, please do not hesitate to get in touch! And if you’re a federal employee looking to visit one of these museums, please call the museum ahead of time for more complete information.
The Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) champions children’s museums worldwide. Follow ACM on Twitter and Facebook.
