On Tuesday, we went to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia. The children's museum just recently reopened in a historic building in the middle of a suburban area park versus their old home downtown. It is now very close to the zoo and several other city attractions. X-man had no interest in posing in front of the sign. :-)
It is a beautiful museum. They spent millions doing the refurb job, and per our Philly tour guides BNB, they carried a lot of the same exhibits from the tiny downtown space to the larger space. There were lots of play cars, trucks, buses and trains to drive, which made X-man very happy.
They also had a mini grocery store and market for kids to go shopping. Here X-man is unloading his purchases onto the counter while a little girl runs the boxes through the scanner.
The one thing MacTroll and I found peculiar was that there was NO signage throughout the entire museum. So, if you're a parent who hasn't had a class in physics or simple car repair or fluid dynamics, you have no idea, as the children play, what they're actually learning by doing. Nor do you have any way of making it an educational experience. But X-man had fun even though his Dad thought it should remove the word "museum" from their name.
The only educational exhibit that we all liked was in the "flight wing." In a very tall room, they had a large contraption with a pulley system. Kids made airplanes from foam pieces, attached them to the pulley and then turned a crank until the plane is at the top. It fell off the pulley and then you could time the descent to see how long your creation could stay airborne. Here you can see how far it goes up (X-man's plane is the red and yellow blip a little to the left of the center of the contraption.
The water table is a norm at children's museums and Please Touch had one that would take up the entire first floor of the Orpheum.
Overall, Please Touch was a great visit for architectural buffs. It had an interesting gift shop and LOTS of exhibits, but it felt like it was a lot of the similar exhibits that you'd see anywhere but with 10 times more kids and chaos. Plus, at $15 per kid, age 12 months and older, smaller, less busy children's museums would probably be a better situation, particularly for kids 5 and under. In addition, all of the toddler play areas were NOT friendly for kids under 2. Babies that were just walking were getting trampled at the pond and in the store and in the Alice and Wonderland exhibit. It would not be worth paying $15 for any kid under the age of 2 and a half.
As it was, it was so busy, it made X-man pretty manic. We were glad that he got the gross motor time, but wow! Busy, busy, busy, chaos!
We used our Orpheum Museum Membership that includes children's museums from around the world, so we entered for free.
Below is the video of Manic X-man during his first 5 minutes in the museum... He just kept wandering around the Alice in Wonderland exhibit because he couldn't figure out what to do first!
5 comments:
Love the plastic strips that you walk through! Yes, Xman looks like he's lost and can't find that one thing he really wants to play with.
The plastic strips in the video made me feel claustrophobic! :)
I wonder what that says about their personalities. X-man is staking out the joint, looking for the best thing to play with. Bubba gets stuck at the first thing he sees and doesn't want to stop to see what else there is.
That looks like an awesome museum!
Children's museums have come a long way since we were little. Remember the early days of the Discovery Center? You are right though, they are all very similar.
It looks like a lot of fun.
It really bothers me the way they price things for kids, I mean 12months and up- that it's crazy, there is such a huge difference between a 1 yr old and even a 4 yr old.
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