Go ahead and touch: Children's museums provide hands-on fun: SouthFlorida.com

South Florida is part of a nationwide trend that shows the number of children's museums increasing dramatically in recent years.

According to Janet Rice Elman, executive director of the national Association of Children's Museums (ACM) in Washington, D.C., 51 new children's museums opened in the 1980s; 86 opened in the 1990s; 24 have opened since 2000; and there are currently 80 new children's museums around the country in planning and construction stages.

More children's museums are opening, Elman says, because families and educators are creating the demand. With studies showing the importance of early brain development, and older children busy in sports and other activities, there is a greater need for fun and educational venues for young children.

Locally, your family can choose from a variety of hands-on children's museums that vary in size, style and theme. Each offers a unique learning experience, a great entertainment value, and a fun way to play indoors.

For added value, you may want to sign up for a membership, which not only supports the growth of the museum, but also will give you free admission for the duration of your membership. Most of the South Florida children's museums are members of the ACM and/or the Florida Association of Museums (FAM), both of which offer reciprocal memberships with free admission to other museums. Check the reciprocal membership list of the museum you join to find out which museums you can enter for free. You may find yourself enjoying free visits to local children's museums, as well as others around the state and the country.

Miami Children's Museum

The new Miami Children's Museum, which opened its doors on Watson Island last September, is worth the drive from wherever you live in South Florida. From the cutting-edge architecture of the two-story, 56,500-square-foot building, to the hundreds of hands-on, bilingual exhibits, this museum has that "wow" factor. It has already been featured in Time magazine and USA Today, and is expected to meet its target of attracting 250,000 visitors per year.

"It's a magical place," says Deborah Spiegelman, executive director of the museum. "The quality and level of the programming sets us apart. People visit from big cities like Boston and Chicago and are overwhelmed and impressed by what we have to offer."

At the Miami Children's Museum, kids and parents can spend the day exploring and playing in various exhibits with a distinctive local flavor. For instance, kids can dress up as firefighters and "virtually" drive a life-sized fire truck through Miami streets. Another exhibit takes you to the Port of Miami, where you can operate cranes and move freight, or climb aboard a cruise ship. You can shop and check out at the Publix exhibit or play "teller" at the Bank of America exhibit. Other highlights include a mini-hospital where children can be the patients and the doctors, the Sea and Me exhibit especially designed for the 5-and-under crowd, and the Castle of Dreams, a two-story pretend sand castle on which kids can climb, slide and explore.

Miami Children's Museum is also a resource for parents and educators with its Parent/Teacher Resource Center, early childhood classes, after-school and weekend classes and programs, field trips, and group camp-ins. Birthday and slumber parties are available too.

The museum features an on-site auditorium, Subway restaurant and gift shop.

Lisa Ann Watson Children's Discovery Museum

The Lisa Ann Watson Children's Discovery Museum, located at the Alper Jewish Community Center in southwestern Miami-Dade County, is another new addition to the lineup of children's museums. It opened in January with the "Chagall for Children" exhibit and is scheduled to bring in "one wonderful exhibit at a time," says Suzy Breitner, director of the museum and the Futernick Family Art Gallery. The museum is part of the JCC's Cultural Arts Center, which also includes an art gallery and a 480-seat seat theater where students from the Miami Children's Theater perform.

The next exhibit, entitled "Jewish Wedding," will open on Aug. 29 and run through Dec. 26. Children will be able to dress up in child-size, traditional bridal gowns and groom garb, learn about wedding customs, pretend to get married under the wedding "chuppah," and create wedding invitations and marriage contracts. The grand opening of the exhibit on Aug. 29 will be free for the community and will include activities that go back to the "pioneer days," such as a pie-eating contest, tug-of-war, and arts and crafts activities.

In January, the museum will bring in an award-winning exhibit called "Where the Wild Things Are: Maurice Sendak in his Own Words and Pictures." It features interactive displays for children, as well as original sketches, music, and letters written by Sendak.

Young at Art Children's Museum

It's been 15 years since Young at Art Children's Museum opened in its first location, a small storefront in Plantation. Since then, the museum has grown by leaps and bounds, expanding into every corner of its 25,000-square-foot home in Davie, where it has been since 1998. And it's not stopping there. By 2008, Young at Art plans to be in a new location that is twice the current size.

Young at Art Executive Director Mindy Shrago, who co-founded the museum with her mother, Esther, said she has been so busy "making it happen" that she has hardly had time to think about how much and how fast it's grown. "We are passionate about who we are," she says.

And just who is that?

"Young at Art is a hands-on children's museum that teaches kids about the world around them through the arts," Shrago says. "We feed their soul with ways to build their self-esteem."

In kids' terms, Young at Art is a fun place with lots of things to touch, climb on, bang on, paint, fold, draw and trace. In parents' terms, the museum features several colorful and creative exhibits, as well as crafts and activities that stimulate your child's imagination.

The permanent exhibits include Earthworks, where children can sit in and drive a life-size recycling truck and help sort and recycle plastic bottles; Global Village, where children get their passports stamped as they experience the cultures of different countries through play and crafts; Kenny's Closet, a psychedelic, black light room; and Playspace for Toddlers, a special gallery for the littlest artists and explorers. This month, the playspace is expanding to include the Petite Picassos art room, with ongoing painting for children 5 and under.

In addition to the permanent exhibits, Young at Art brings in traveling exhibits, such as the "Arthur's World" exhibition, based on the PBS series Arthur, which is currently on display through Oct. 3. To coincide with the exhibit, the character Arthur is making appearances on weekends and is available by request for birthday parties held at the museum.

On Oct. 19, the museum will bring in "Amusement Park Science," an exhibit through which children will learn about and explore the physics of amusement park rides.

During a visit to the museum, there's often an opportunity to take advantage of a free, drop-in workshop or take part in a special story time or other program. The museum also offers camps, birthday parties, art classes, and opportunities for teens to volunteer and work with art.

As proud as she is of what Young at Art offers on-site, Shrago says she's doubly proud of what the museum is doing off-site. The museum was recently one of six museums in the country to receive a grant from the Federal Institute of Museum and Library Services. As a result, Young at Art has established ArtREACH, a two-year after-school program that will bring art instruction to homeless children.

My Jewish Discovery Place

When the Soref JCC in Sunrise created My Jewish Discovery Place over four years ago, it was one of the first Jewish children's museums in the Southeast. The museum, with 13 permanent exhibits, is an "interactive play space with educational components," says Sharon Marsten-McKenna, director of the museum and director of cultural arts at the Soref JCC.

While many of the exhibits teach about Jewish traditions and customs, they are entertaining and educational for all. "Our exhibits are built to be pro-tolerance and to teach kids that we're not all the same and we should celebrate the differences," she says.

While exploring the museum, kids can climb on a wooden boat and pretend to be immigrants coming to a new land. They can see what life is like on a farm, or kibbutz, picking oranges, milking a cow, and loading produce to take to the market. They can pretend to blast off in the glow-in-the-dark space room or dress up as a doctor or ambulance driver in the "People Helping People" exhibit. Outside, children can go on their own archaeological dig, discovering artifacts in the sand. There is also an outdoor market, a wedding exhibit, and a holiday meal exhibit.

In the near future, My Jewish Discovery Place will be adding two exhibits - a music exhibit where children can make music and create instruments, and a water exhibit that will highlight the differences between salt and fresh water marine life.

Children's Museum of Boca Raton

As it turns 25 this October, the Children's Museum of Boca Raton can stake its claim as one of the oldest children's museums in the area. Appropriately, it is located within the oldest remaining house in Boca Raton, a wooden cracker residence known as "Singing Pines."

"Because the museum is in a home, it has that comfortable, homey kind of feeling about it," says Poppi Mercier, executive director. "The children can wrap their arms around it and it feels like a safe environment, because it is small enough where they can explore the exhibits on their own."

While the museum began in 1979 as a way to provide local history and exhibits to children and families, it has since expanded to include hands-on exploration in the sciences, culture, arts and humanities. Many of the exhibits still have that vintage feeling, such as the Ricketts Corner Store, where children can shop the old-fashioned way in a replica of Boca Raton's first grocery store, and Oscar's Post Office, where kids can make their own postcards and even mail them, if they want.

Other exhibits include A Space Place, which explores space travel; Dr. Dig's Back Porch, where kids can dig up fossils and artifacts; and Audubon and Friends, a living exhibition with animals such as small rodents and sea crabs.

The Boca museum also offers special programs and events, such as the Traveling Museum, which brings workshops to schools, and the Tale Spinners Club, an hourlong show presented on Boca Raton Educational Television that uses stories, puppets and crafts to teach about arts and sciences. Plans are under way to expand the museum by adding a 4,000-square-foot building that will feature a computer lab, a TV production room and other new exhibits.

Children's Science Explorium

If your child gets excited about making things happen and figuring out why they happen, he or she will love the Children's Science Explorium, a small children's science museum at Sugar Sand Park in Boca Raton that is free of charge. Designed primarily for elementary school-age children, the Explorium features interactive exhibits that use entertaining principles and experiments to help children learn about physical science, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

"The children have fun and learn science along the way," says Becky Self, recreation center manager at Sugar Sand Park.

Among the Explorium's many permanent exhibits are a fog chamber, an air cannon, pulleys and levers, sound-wave experiments, and optical illusions. The Explorium also brings in traveling exhibits. Through the end of August, children can play with a magnetics display to explore the many ways that magnetism impacts nature and our daily lives.

Every month, children can take advantage of a variety of classes at a cost of only $3 for residents of Boca Raton and $3.45 for nonresidents. They can learn about bubbles, weather, volcanoes, "icky squishy chemistry" experiments and more.

The Science Summer Camp at the Explorium is popular, too. "Activities include making ice cream, which teaches them about chemistry, and blasting off rockets, which teaches them about physics. The campers also take photographs using a 1-gallon paint can and then develop the film," Self said. "Science done right is a lot of fun."

Schoolhouse Children's Museum

The history of Boynton Beach comes alive in an exciting way for kids who visit the Schoolhouse Children's Museum. Housed in Boynton Beach's first elementary schoolhouse, a 1913 building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the museum takes families on a journey through exhibitions in six classrooms that were used for first through 12th grade until 1927.

One of the first attention-grabbers is a 15-foot replica of the Jupiter lighthouse. Knock on the door and you'll rouse the animatronic lighthouse keeper, Hannibal Pierce, who tells six different stories. Then the kids can explore train travel by buying tickets, dressing up as a conductor or engineer, and hopping on the train. In other exhibits, children explore farm life and ride a tractor; drive a milk truck and milk a cow; shop at the General Store; fish on the Hypoluxo Steamer; and crawl through an alligator at Mangrove Manor.

"There used to be 16 dairy farms in Boynton Beach. But children today think that milk comes from a supermarket," says Arleen Dennison, executive director of the museum. "When they come in here, they experience things the way the pioneers might have experienced them. They can feel what it was like to milk a cow."

Adding to the fun at the museum are "make and take" drop-in programs offered several times each month, as well as drop-in story times. For a materials fee of $1 for members and $1.50 for nonmembers, you can also join one of the Old Time Games and Pastimes classes, where everyone can participate in some old-time fun with jacks, marbles, puzzles, mazes, Chinese Checkers, pick-up sticks and other games.

Whether it's history, science, art, math or culture, South Florida's children's museums make the lessons easy and entertaining for kids. Children's museums are affordable, educational, and fun. What more could a parent want?

Ellen Wolfson Valladares is freelance writer and mother of two. She lives in Weston.