Indianapolis is My Home

22
Jun

A Day at the Children’s Museum

Author: Jason Bean, Category: Childrens Museum, Cultural Events

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My family and I spent the day at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum, along with friends from Cincinnati and their kids. If you’re not aware of it, the museum is ranked the #1 children’s museum in the nation and it’s the largest. The following was taken directly from their website.

The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, a nonprofit institution committed to enriching the lives of children, is the largest children’s museum in the world. The more than 400,000-square-foot facility houses 11 major galleries that explore the physical and natural sciences, history, world cultures and the arts. The Children’s Museum is a place to learn and do. Whenever possible, exhibits are “hands-on” or participatory in nature. The Children’s Museum strives to be one of the vital links in the lives of children as it supports their intellectual curiosity and love of learning. The museum, situated on 14 acres of land in Indianapolis, presents thousands of programs and activities each year.

We started off with the dinosaur exhibit and I was impressed with the variety of skeletons of dinosaurs that were available. Perhaps most interesting though were the hands on dinosaur “dig” activities the kids could participate in by chiseling out play dirt and rock around sets of bones.

Other big exhibits that were very impressive were the Chihuly Fireworks of Glass exhibit. They did try to provide some hands-on types of activities for the glass, but it’s obviously harder to do that. I think it would have been interesting to have some glass artists actually producing some things. I remember watching similar things in our shopping mall when I was growing up as a child.

The newest exhibit is the Spymaker exhibit and it was really fun. The science behind everything and the interactivity was really fun for the kids. Although over the head of my five-year old daughter, I think my son really got into it and would have even more if I hadn’t been trying to explain everything to my five-year.

We were there for almost 5 hours and just ran out of time. I had completely forgot about the new mazes and illusions exhibit. The museum seemed pretty crowded, but this time we decided to get a premiere membership, so we’ll be coming back more frequently.

Too many times today I found myself trying to rush my kids through the exhibits because I knew there were other things they wanted to see and wanted to have my friends experience as much as they could as well.

But we’ll be back and begin enjoying our premiere membership to the Indianapolis Children’s Museum.