Imagine It!, The Children's Museum of Atlanta

OK, so even though I’m now going to school at Tufts and exploring Boston-area museums, I have to give proper respect to Atlanta, where I lived for most of the last 14 years.  There you’ll find a number of museums, including Imagine It!, The Children’s Museum of Atlanta, which targets children ages eight and under.  As with other children’s museums, this is a fun, hands-on environment filled with great exhibits for families to explore.  These are a few of them:

·        Fundamentally Food traces the path that our food takes from the farm to the grocery store and to our tables.  For many children today, food is something that comes from the grocery store and they have no idea that what they eat starts out on a farm.  This exhibit offers children a window into what happens, starting with the farm area.  Here you can find a John Deere tractor that kids can climb on, fruits and vegetables to choose, and a life-sized cow model that can be “milked."

Buttercup the cow

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      From there you'll move on to an exciting forklift and delivery truck so that food can travel to the grocery store and be used to stock the shelves.  After shopping and buying groceries, kids can move on to the house area to prepare a meal.  Well laid-out and very interactive, this exhibit provides a nice foundation for understanding the origins of and the path taken by food.  It may still help to talk with your child about what’s happening to make the connections more explicit, and it might even prompt a visit to a farm.  But lots of other learning takes place here as well, including development of language, motor skills, imagination, and cooperation (there are a lot of kids playing together here!).  You can also engage your child in math skills by sorting and counting the food, or talk about nutrition when putting together meals.

What are ideas for extending the learning outside of the museum?

o       Check out a farmer’s market to buy some locally grown produce and talk with people who grow our food.  

o       Learn about nutrition by creating a collage of healthy food pictures cut out from magazines or grocery store ads.

o       Do you have toy food at home?  Work with your child on sorting them into groups (colors, healthy/unhealthy, like/don’t like, fruits/vegetables/meats/etc.).

o       I know that taking your child to the grocery store isn’t always the most fun, and it might be the last place you want to think about learning.  So how about taking advantage of the opportunities available before you leave your home?  Enlisting your child’s support in counting what you have at home, writing shopping lists together, and planning meals can develop his/her literacy, math, and critical thinking skills.

Playing with sand at Let Your Creativity Flow

·        At Let Your Creativity Flow, children and parents alike will have fun being imaginative and expressing themselves.  One of visitors’ favorite activities is making sand sculptures, which is a great tactile experience.  At home, I would recommend giving children lots of chances to play with different materials, starting when they are really little and they’re learning about the world through their senses and motor skills.

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o       Make playdough at home!  There are lots of recipes available, but here is one link to check out: http://www.bostonkids.org/grownups/playdough.html.

o       Use shaving cream.  Not only is it a fun kinesthetic experience, but if you spread it out, it acts like a white board for drawing numbers, letters, and shapes.  I’d suggest putting the shaving cream on a tray of some sort to limit how far the shaving cream will spread – and trust me, it will get all over the place.

o       Have a box full of rice or sand, then add spoons, measuring cups, funnels, and different-sized containers.  This is a great opportunity to learn about size and measurement.  Also put in small toy animals or people so kids can bury, play with, and make up stories about them.

·        The last exhibit I’ll talk about is Tools for Solutions.  The centerpiece is a giant ball machine that uses the six simple machines – pulleys, levers, screws, inclined planes, wheel and axle, and wedges – and lots of teamwork to move plastic balls around the system.   This is the ultimate cooperative learning experience, bringing together kids and adults to plan, problem solve, talk, and devise strategies to make the balls travel up, down, through, and all around the machine.  I challenge parents not to get involved!

The ball machine at Tools for Solutions

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o       The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago has a great website with science-related activities, videos, and games, some of which are for older children.  A fun on-line game about simple machines can be found at http://www.msichicago.org/online-science/simple-machines/activities/simple-machines-1/.