![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinBoston has lots of great places to take kids to see/interact with cool stuff; there's the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Science, and the Boston Children's Museum, all of which are justly famous. But they're a long enough trip for us that we have to plan ahead a little to go there; closer alternatives are welcome for spur-of-the-moment visits. Here are some we like:
The Children's Museum of New Hampshire is really an impressive place; it moved a few years ago to a newly refurbished space in a former gymnasium in Dover. It follows the usual children's-museum format, catering to, I'd say, a toddler-to-6-or-7 set with lots of elaborately decorated spaces for pretend play, some simple science, history and culture exhibits, a big craft area, and stuff you can touch and wear. Everything's new, clean and in really good shape, which is saying something, since these places take a lot of abuse. Some exhibits pay special attention to the local river environments and the textile-mill history of the area.
Jorie particularly likes the post office and the submarine; many of these places seem compelled to have a "submarine" room, but the one at CMoNH is particularly nice, with a bright yellow streamlined shell, a working periscope and sonar rig, and LCD windows in front showing giant squid and abyssal fish tooling around black smoker vents. My favorite is the "Build It. Fly It." exhibit in which you can stick together maple-seed-like pieces of foam with Velcro, hoist them with a hand-cranked lift to the vicinity of the ceiling, and let them go. There are also special areas reserved for babies and toddlers.
We have a membership here, of a type that offers reciprocal membership in both the Association of Children's Museums and the Association of Science and Technology Centers, which gets us free admission to a huge number of children's and science museums around the country. (The ASTC membership sometimes has a 90-mile exclusion zone, but this seems to be waived at least some of the time; we've gotten into the Boston MoS free with it, so it pays for itself in a hurry.) It's a great deal if you have kids and have any interest in visiting these places more than a couple of times a year.
SEE Science Center is a smaller and less elaborate, but still nifty, place in Manchester in a mill-building space originally donated by Dean Kamen. Like most self-identified science museums, it aims mostly at older kids, maybe 7 to 16, but has a play area for the really little ones and a fair amount to interest adults. The slightly incongruous centerpiece here is a gigantic Lego model of the entire Manchester Amoskeag Millyard at minifig scale, as it appeared around the turn of the 20th century, with minifigs doing all manner of characteristic things around the buildings.
Jorie's favorite thing here is the classic Bernoulli Blower rig, which lets you levitate playground balls in an adjustable stream of air. It seems to be more powerful than the typical science-museum setup (they can probably get away with it because the whole thing is in a net-enclosed area that protects the rest of the place from hurtling projectiles; this also allows kids to get slightly rowdy in there). I like the acoustics exhibit, particularly the weird guitar/foot-pedal/strobe-wheel contraption that lets you directly view the waveforms on a vibrating string. The bubble table works best on the days when the van de Graaff generator demo doesn't, and vice versa.
Lately, we've been going fairly often to the Discovery Museums in Acton, Mass. There are two museums, one in the children's-museum mold for younger kids and one in the science-museum mold for older ones. Jorie is in the age range where she can appreciate both of them.
The children's museum is pretty unique, since it's in an old Victorian house and it's divided up into all these small themed spaces instead of big open areas. It isn't as fancy as the CMoNH but I think the intimacy of it appeals to little kids; there's a train room, a water room, an animal-costume room, a ship room, etc. and on slow days there might only be a couple of kids in an individual room at a time (I've heard that on peak days they have to assign families delayed entry times for the sake of the fire code, but I've never actually seen that happen). The most impressive thing in there is the room that is all Rube Goldbergian tracks for rubber lacrosse balls and golf balls, with devices that they can knock over, ring or disrupt along the way.
Meanwhile, the science-museum half is surprisingly packed with cool hands-on stuff, maybe more individual exhibits than SEE Science Center though they're mostly on a smaller scale. I think what really makes this place is the enthusiastic staff. Jorie likes the fog vortex you can walk through, the harmonograph (which, unlike many such exhibits, has a staff member there all the time to operate it), and all the things that make noise on the second floor; but her favorite part is the wood shop where she can hammer and saw things for real.
On nice days, the grounds of the place are equally worth visiting; there are a bunch of musical instrument/sculptures about the area, a particularly effective pair of whispering-gallery dishes, a nautically themed play area, a fiberglass dinosaur you can ride on and a great big sandbox.
(Come to think of it, we actually haven't ever taken Jorie to the Boston Children's Museum, something we should probably rectify before she's too old, but the alternatives are such that I'm not sure she's that deprived.)
The Children's Museum of New Hampshire is really an impressive place; it moved a few years ago to a newly refurbished space in a former gymnasium in Dover. It follows the usual children's-museum format, catering to, I'd say, a toddler-to-6-or-7 set with lots of elaborately decorated spaces for pretend play, some simple science, history and culture exhibits, a big craft area, and stuff you can touch and wear. Everything's new, clean and in really good shape, which is saying something, since these places take a lot of abuse. Some exhibits pay special attention to the local river environments and the textile-mill history of the area.
Jorie particularly likes the post office and the submarine; many of these places seem compelled to have a "submarine" room, but the one at CMoNH is particularly nice, with a bright yellow streamlined shell, a working periscope and sonar rig, and LCD windows in front showing giant squid and abyssal fish tooling around black smoker vents. My favorite is the "Build It. Fly It." exhibit in which you can stick together maple-seed-like pieces of foam with Velcro, hoist them with a hand-cranked lift to the vicinity of the ceiling, and let them go. There are also special areas reserved for babies and toddlers.
We have a membership here, of a type that offers reciprocal membership in both the Association of Children's Museums and the Association of Science and Technology Centers, which gets us free admission to a huge number of children's and science museums around the country. (The ASTC membership sometimes has a 90-mile exclusion zone, but this seems to be waived at least some of the time; we've gotten into the Boston MoS free with it, so it pays for itself in a hurry.) It's a great deal if you have kids and have any interest in visiting these places more than a couple of times a year.
SEE Science Center is a smaller and less elaborate, but still nifty, place in Manchester in a mill-building space originally donated by Dean Kamen. Like most self-identified science museums, it aims mostly at older kids, maybe 7 to 16, but has a play area for the really little ones and a fair amount to interest adults. The slightly incongruous centerpiece here is a gigantic Lego model of the entire Manchester Amoskeag Millyard at minifig scale, as it appeared around the turn of the 20th century, with minifigs doing all manner of characteristic things around the buildings.
Jorie's favorite thing here is the classic Bernoulli Blower rig, which lets you levitate playground balls in an adjustable stream of air. It seems to be more powerful than the typical science-museum setup (they can probably get away with it because the whole thing is in a net-enclosed area that protects the rest of the place from hurtling projectiles; this also allows kids to get slightly rowdy in there). I like the acoustics exhibit, particularly the weird guitar/foot-pedal/strobe-wheel contraption that lets you directly view the waveforms on a vibrating string. The bubble table works best on the days when the van de Graaff generator demo doesn't, and vice versa.
Lately, we've been going fairly often to the Discovery Museums in Acton, Mass. There are two museums, one in the children's-museum mold for younger kids and one in the science-museum mold for older ones. Jorie is in the age range where she can appreciate both of them.
The children's museum is pretty unique, since it's in an old Victorian house and it's divided up into all these small themed spaces instead of big open areas. It isn't as fancy as the CMoNH but I think the intimacy of it appeals to little kids; there's a train room, a water room, an animal-costume room, a ship room, etc. and on slow days there might only be a couple of kids in an individual room at a time (I've heard that on peak days they have to assign families delayed entry times for the sake of the fire code, but I've never actually seen that happen). The most impressive thing in there is the room that is all Rube Goldbergian tracks for rubber lacrosse balls and golf balls, with devices that they can knock over, ring or disrupt along the way.
Meanwhile, the science-museum half is surprisingly packed with cool hands-on stuff, maybe more individual exhibits than SEE Science Center though they're mostly on a smaller scale. I think what really makes this place is the enthusiastic staff. Jorie likes the fog vortex you can walk through, the harmonograph (which, unlike many such exhibits, has a staff member there all the time to operate it), and all the things that make noise on the second floor; but her favorite part is the wood shop where she can hammer and saw things for real.
On nice days, the grounds of the place are equally worth visiting; there are a bunch of musical instrument/sculptures about the area, a particularly effective pair of whispering-gallery dishes, a nautically themed play area, a fiberglass dinosaur you can ride on and a great big sandbox.
(Come to think of it, we actually haven't ever taken Jorie to the Boston Children's Museum, something we should probably rectify before she's too old, but the alternatives are such that I'm not sure she's that deprived.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-05-22 07:45 am (UTC)In 1998 or so,
Date: 2011-05-22 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-22 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-22 04:21 pm (UTC)Re: In 1998 or so,
Date: 2011-05-22 04:30 pm (UTC)Sounds like
Date: 2011-05-22 09:32 pm (UTC)Re: Sounds like
Date: 2011-05-23 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-23 11:00 am (UTC)Downstairs from SEE
Date: 2011-05-23 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-24 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-02 01:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-03 02:47 am (UTC)