Home Sweet Colorado Pt. 3: Our Museum-Going Family

Confession time...I am a museum nerd, and have been since childhood. I really like visiting museums--any type, I'm not picky! I love visiting galleries, looking at lots of neat stuff, and learning things I didn't know before. This love of learning is something I hope I can pass down to my children

I've been lucky, in that throughout my life I have lived in cities with many good museums to visit. Tucson, while not as "family-friendly" as other places I've lived, still has several museums/learning centers worth visiting: the Tucson Children's Museum; the Reid Park Zoo; the International Wildlife Museum; The Pima Air & Space Museum; and (my personal favorite) the lovely Arizona/Sonora Desert Museum.

When I visited Colorado last month, I decided to take my girls to a few museums I used to visit as a kid. In so doing, I was reminded just how good the Denver-area museums are; I was a very lucky kid indeed!

The Denver Children's Museum

  I took Lorelai & Celeste here a few days after arriving in Denver, although I hadn't personally visited the Children's Museum since...well, since I was a child myself. I had very fond memories of it, though, and hoped that it would be worth the trip. This museum is also in LoDo (Lower Downtown to you non-Denverites), a very fun, happening part of the city. Some of the museum's "neighbors" include:

Invesco Field at Mile High (or Mile High Stadium II...whatever), home of the greatest football team in America, the Denver Broncos. This picture was taken from the Children's Museum's front lawn looking south.

Six Flags Elitch Gardens is also close by the museum; it lies just to the east, across the Platte River. Further northeast is Coors Field, where the Colorado Rockies play. Just to the north is the City Aquarium; further east yet is the 16th St. Mall, an open-air walking mall with stores for all ages & tastes. In short, LoDo has TONS of fun stuff to do. However, today we were just here to visit the Children's Museum, so in we went!!

The museum turned out to be quite fun--about as good as I remember, although much changed.

We spent some time in one of the activity rooms, where the girls played a "game show" called "Meal or No Meal." They had to try out anonymous samples of different fruits & vegetables, identify them, and decide whether they were good components of a healthy meal or not (hint: they were ALL healthy, so hooray for healthy snacks!).

Later, the girls got to build their own train routes...

And dress up as a ballerina (Celeste) and a Hogwarts student (Lorelai) at the costume area.

Much time, however, was spent in the "Bubble Lab." This place had several stations filled with wet, filmy bubble solution, and lots of ways to create bubbles. Here's Lorelai (in a lab coat & glasses, to prevent from getting completely sticky), with a few of her creations.

At another station, you could create "smoky" bubbles, by wetting the end of a tube emitting steam, then letting the bubble grow from the end of the tube. If your hand was wet, you could grab the bubbles yourself...

...as Celeste is doing here. The most exciting part of these bubbles was popping them in your hand, then watching the "smoke" escape & float away.

After blowing LOTS of bubbles, we headed for the "nature area," an interactive environment where kids could crawl around in mock-ups of various animal habitats or living spaces (a hollow tree, a nest, a big hole in the ground, etc.)

And, much like the Tucson Children's Museum, the fire truck was my girls' most anticipated exhibit, so we saved it for last:

Hooray! There was also a play food store, an outdoor sandbox, and a voice distorter that my girls had a blast with but I didn't have time to photograph. In short, it was a great way to kill a few hours and let their imaginations run wild. I can't wait to bring them back here again next year.

The Denver Museum of Nature & Science

 

 This is the museum I visited more than any other in my youth; my parents have had a membership here for as long as I can remember. I'm glad they have it; the more museums I've visited over my lifetime (and I've seen some pretty prestigious museums by this point), the more I realize that the Denver Museum is a top-tier effort. It has dozens of large, roomy exhibit halls; it attracts big-name traveling exhibits; it's got an IMAX Theater and a Planetarium...and it's all kept very up-to-date and sophisticated. I love it, and hoped Lorelai & Celeste would love it too!

Like many museums, the Denver museum has many life-size wildlife dioramas. These are one of the museum's older attractions (most of them were here when I was a little kid), but our kids enjoyed them anyway:

Look, manatees! (complete with underwater-lighting effects)

The kangaroos were another favorite. Then it was on to the space exhibit, adjacent to the Planetarium. There were LOTS of cool things in this hall, including a Mars Rover simulation for the kids, lots of hands-on physics experiments (not all of which were working, sadly), and this neat globe/screen, on which you could project the topographies of most planets in our solar system:

There was also a "Junior Astronauts" section for little kids, including astronaut gear!

While the girls played dress-up, I enjoyed the multimedia display nearby about current space operations--it included a whiteboard with handwritten, HOURLY status updates of the various explorer modules currently operating in our solar system. Pretty cool for a space geek like myself.

The Denver Museum has definitely improved its exhibits for young children. This large room is called the "Discovery Zone," and it contains just about any crazy learning activity your preschooler could want. There's a piano with its insides on view, to see how the sounds are made; a wind tunnel complete with various objects to throw inside it (it's neat to watch swatches of cloth twist & turn in the wind); blocks; sandboxes; tabletop science experiments; art projects; skeletons; and a life-size anatomically correct dummy, complete with all its internal organs:

Celeste loved it. There was also a small stage for special events; however, even when it wasn't open for business, there was an interactive slide show projected onto the stage, encouraging the kids in the audience to wiggle, dance, & identify colors & shapes:

Then it was on to an old favorite (albeit with a major facelift)--the Hall of Prehistoric Life:

The museum has had these dinosaur skeletons for decades, but due to continuing research, has reassembled them into what scientists believe is more anatomically accurate (ie, tails held out in the air behind them, for balance, not dragging on the ground). In addition, the skeletons used to stand opposite each other across the gallery--BORING! Now we can see them attacking each other--whee!

But the Hall of Prehistoric Life covers the history of ALL life on the planet, not just the dinosaurs. As a result, evolution has to be discussed. The girls loved doing a "breeding simulation" on this computer terminal, in which moths were "naturally selected" for breeding over several generations, and differences in the generations could be compared:

All in all, a great way to spend our morning. There were MANY exhibits available at the Denver Museum of Science & Nature that we skipped or skimmed (we didn't travel to the human health & anatomy section at all, we gave the Native American cultures wing a brief run-through, and we barely gave the mummies a glance). At least half of the animal dioramas were left unseen. We also decided to forgo the IMAX & Planetarium shows, which run several times daily.

So, I guess I'm saying...this is an AWESOME museum! If your kids are a little older than mine (school-age or greater), you could easily blow a whole day inside this museum (I should know; I did it many times as a kid myself!).

But in spite of all the wonders within, one thing amazed my girls more than anything else: the escalators. That's right...the escalators. Apparently I haven't done my duty as a parent, and my kids have been criminally underexposed to moving staircases over the course of their lives. Watching them approach these magical devices, eyes as big as dinner plates (and riding on their butts most of the way down--they were afraid to stand up on the stairs!), made me wonder why I hadn't just taken them to a mall instead...

Success! And the best part? This being a museum, this particular escalator had a Plexiglass wall, so curious visitors could look inside the machine's inner workings, and learn just how those stairs move up, down, and around.

Yeah...I knew we came to the museum for a reason...to learn!

(Okay, City of Denver, I'll take that check now)