Great guideline from the Association of Children’s Museums 2010 Interactivity panel “The Changing Face of Technology in Children’s Museums”.

The 3/6/9/12 rule:

No computer screens before age 3, no internet before age 6, no electronic gaming until age 9 and no unsupervised internet before age 12.

The amazing fall of the San Fernando Valley’s children’s museum.

Nights at the museum – LA Daily News

Posted using ShareThis

By SARA KINCAID Bismarck Tribune | Posted: Friday, December 4, 2009 2:00 am

“Planning continues on the idea of a children’s museum in Mandan.

The founding board for the North Dakota Children’s Museum met Thursday evening in Mandan. It was the board’s second meeting. A children’s museum has interactive exhibits for children.

“It’s not sterile, where you can’t touch anything,” said Sara Hills, one of the co-founders of the museum.

Hills is spearheading the children’s museum effort with Wendy Anderson-Berg. Hills is a kindergarten teacher in Mandan Public Schools and Anderson-Berg works for Bismarck Parks and Recreation.”

From the Morning Sun

“The proposed Mt. Pleasant Discovery Museum is still a dream, but the dream could be a little closer to reality.

Organizers of the children’s museum announced last week the start of a capital campaign. The group that began with four mothers and an idea says that to make the project a reality, it wants to raise $3 million.”

Children’s museum site dedicated

By AMANDA O’TOOLE World Correspondent
Published: 9/28/2009
Tulsa World
Ruth Cavins, the executive director of the Stillwater Children’s Museum, talked about how the organization has grown to serve more than just the city and …

Interior Rendering of new Chicago Children’s Museum

By Micah Maidenberg
Editor, Chicago Journal
Published July 13, 2009
Link to Story

“It’s a big story.
Veteran Crain’s Business columnist Greg Hinz is reporting the Chicago Children’s Museum’s planned move to Grant Park is in trouble. The museum says it is moving forward.
Here’s the nut of Hinz’s story:

A moribund economy now may have a better chance of blocking the project than lawsuits by parks activists and neighborhood opponents. Fundraising has foundered while projected costs have climbed by tens of millions to $150 million or more, Crain’s has learned. Sources close to the project say odds now are 50-50 at best that the Grant Park plan will proceed.

Hinz pulled the group’s last income tax report from the attorney general’s office and found the museum had “$28.1 million in “pledges receivable” as of June 30, 2008—just $1 million more than it did a year earlier.”
And broader trends in construction projects are not helping either: Hinz reports that the project is now said to cost anywhere from $115 million to $175 million, up from $85 million.
The museum released this statement about the story to Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, as reported on Kamin’s blog:

Chicago Children’s Museum is moving forward with the plan to relocate to Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Grant Park. There is no news to report in that regard. Greg Hinz’s piece in Crain’s Chicago Business relies only on unnamed sources, and should be viewed with extreme skepticism.

Which brought this response by Hinz on his blog:

The statement says the project is “moving forward” — the same thing the museum told me without indicating where it will get the money.
The statement doesn’t deny that the price is up tens of millions of dollars a year, or that it’s talking with McPier about extending its lease at Navy Pier, key points of the above.
And while the statement correctly notes that I talked to unnamed sources, it neglects to note that one of those “unnamed sources” was its own income tax return, which shows that, even a year ago, fundraising for the museum was minimal.
The museum can clear up all of this if it begins answering a few questions. Like how much building the Grant Park facility now is projected to
cost. Or what it wants from McPier. And how much funding it has committed in the past couple of years.

Here’s the statement the children’s museum sent me:

Chicago Children’s Museum is moving forward with our plan to relocate to Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Grant Park. We are confident that we have made substantial progress, and that our donors, supporters and the community remain engaged, enthusiastic and wholly committed to Chicago Children’s Museum. We have never felt better about the quality of our educational programs, exhibits and community partnerships. Along with our partners, we are creating a world-class museum in the center of the city that’s accessible to all of Chicago’s children and families. Any reports that the project is in peril are erroneous.

Asked about the change between statements, Natalie Kreiger, spokeswoman for the museum, wrote an e-mail that “The statement I sent you more adequately addresses the project and museum as a whole.”"

NAVY PIER | Slow fund-raising stalls move to Grant Park

From the Chicago Sun-Times

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

July 13, 2009

Link to Article

The Children’s Museum is negotiating an “open-ended” extension to its Navy Pier lease amid a fund-raising slowdown that threatens to stall its controversial move to Grant Park.

Ted Tetzlaff, chairman of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, said the museum’s troubles prompted McPier to open talks on an extension of a lease due to expire in 2010.

“It’s taken them longer than they figured to get their plans straightened out and financed. So, our people are working with them to extend their lease until they’re ready to move. It’s sort of open-ended,” Tetzlaff said Monday.

“We’ve made it clear to them they’re welcome for as long as they want to stay. … We realize they’ve made a decision to do something else. We’re just trying to accommodate them until they’re ready to go.”

Children’s Museum CEO Jennifer Farrington issued a prepared statement categorically denying a report by Crain’s Chicago Business that rising costs and a fund-raising slowdown had placed the move to Grant Park in jeopardy.

“Chicago Children’s Museum is moving forward with our plan to relocate to Daley Bicentennial Plaza in Grant Park. We are confident that we have made substantial progress, and that our donors, supporters and the community remain engaged, enthusiastic and wholly committed” to the move, she said.

Children’s Museum spokesman Eric Sedler characterized the Navy Pier lease negotiations as routine and part of a “regular review that happens between the museum and McPier” every year at this time.

“It would be a mistake for anybody to assume automatically that there is going to be an extension,” Sedler said.

He added, “There are absolutely no specific discussions in place having to do with any specific time-frame” for an extension.

In June, 2008, the City Council voted 33 to 16 to approve Mayor Daley’s controversial plan to build a new, $100 million Children’s Museum in Grant Park over the strenuous objections of downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd).

It was the first time in four years that the City Council had violated aldermanic prerogative — the treasured tradition of deferring to the wishes of the local alderman on zoning and development issues.

The vote set the stage for a marathon court fight over 172 years of legal protections — affirmed by four Illinois Supreme Court rulings — that have kept Grant Park “forever open, clear and free,” as Montgomery Ward sought.

Earlier this year, a Circuit Court judge sided with the Children’s Museum in a lawsuit filed on procedural issues. But, opponents are waiting until ground is broken in Grant Park before filing a lawsuit based on the Montgomery Ward decisions. The threat of such a lawsuit, coupled with the prolonged recession, has made fund-raising difficult.

Tutankhamun shabti, © SANDRO VANNINI

From: Nuvo,  “Indy’s Alternative Newspaper”

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Julianna Thibodeaux

Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs, one of the most high-profile blockbusters the city has seen recently, has just opened in unlikely quarters: the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. This local institution, touted as the world’s largest children’s museum, is actually not such a leap: the behemoth building with its newly expanded Welcome Center — two additional dinosaur replicas penetrating the new stories-high wall of windows in a perpetual state of party crashing — has certainly expanded to fill its increasingly large paw prints … but in a measured and strategic way. It is in this sense that Tut is a surprise.

President and CEO Jeffrey Patchen, speaking to me in a telephone interview after I’d toured the exhibition with my three children — ages 14, 4 and 2 — admitted that, while such an awe-inspiring exhibition does fit in with the museum’s mission — “to create extraordinary learning experiences that have the power to transform the lives of children and families” — it is also a departure: At a member rate of $15 for adults and $8 for children (non-members pay $25 and $15, with some discounts available), with prices determined by exhibition organizers, the mere fact of a ticket price separate from regular museum admission is something the museum largely did away with years ago. But as Patchen pointed out, the museum would not have been able to pay the rental fee for such a blockbuster. And this one practically fell in its lap, like a dust shower inside an Egyptian tomb.

The story begins four years ago, when the museum, through the development of another exhibit, first allied itself with Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt — referred to by Patchen as the real Indiana Jones — who invited museum staff to consult with first lady Suzanne Mubarak on the development of a children’s museum in Cairo. Hawass told Patchen, “We’ll work out some sort of thank you that’s appropriate.” And so it was announced, roughly two years later, that this latest Tutankhamun blockbuster would make its second stop (after Atlanta) in Indianapolis.

In order to make the exhibition more accessible, a $2 million grant from the Lilly Endowment was secured to underwrite the cost of free admission for 98,000 Indiana school students. Patchen told me more than 60,000 of these have already been claimed — so teachers reading this should act quickly to reserve their tickets.

While Tut is wonderful for the 8-and-up set (and museum literature promotes it as such), it is best not wasted on the younger ones. Taking my kids through Tut was more of a treat for me (and my 14-year-old) than it was for my younger kids; the beautiful artifacts displayed in moodily-lit galleries, some of which are organized according to what was found in the rooms of Tutankhamun’s tomb, while stunning, were so much statuary to my youngest, who kept trying to clear the security ropes to scale the pharaohs and funerary urns.

Save their ticket prices for the gift shop. But first hurry them over to Take Me There: Egypt, which reaffirms the museum’s excellence in installation development: Children (and their parents) can enlighten themselves about language and communication, urban and rural living spaces, the marketplace, care of the environment, and visual and performing arts in the country of Egypt, which many will learn for the first time is in Africa. Such a cultural immersion should do much to alleviate prejudice against the predominantly Muslim country, which too many Americans associate with terrorism and the events of Sept. 11.

While Tut is organized by National Geographic, Arts and Exhibitions International and AEG Exhibitions, the museum developed this new permanent but thematically-revolving installation Take Me There (replacing Passport to the World) to coincide with Tut. Take Me There: Egypt, open for the next two years, is free with regular museum admission; and as a companion to Tut, it does for children what Tut cannot: provide the kind of hands-on, interactive experience for which the museum is known.

Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs runs through October 2009. The museum is located at 3000 N. Meridian St. For tickets, visit www.childrensmuseum.org or www.kingtut.org.

Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
3000 N. Meridian
Indianapolis, IN 46206
www.childrensmuseum.org

10,000 square foot exhibition
$4.4 Million Dollar Budget

3 of 5 Stars, “A-Okay”

Posted: June 10, 2009

Please Touch Museum

Memorial Hall, Fairmount Park

4231 Avenue of the Republic

Philadelphia, PA 19131

(215) 581-3181

www.pleasetouchmuseum.org

Category: Children’s Museum

Admission Price: $15 Children and Adults

Size: 38,000 sq. ft. of exhibits

Wheelchair Accessible: Yes

From Please Touch website:

“Memorial Hall, constructed to be the Art Gallery of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition and first home to the renowned Philadelphia Museum of Art, is the new home of Please Touch Museum, the nation’s first museum for children ages seven and under (This is inaccurate, Brooklyn Children’s is he oldest Children’s Museum in the nation). Please Touch is a hands-on “first museum experience” for kids, with child-friendly exhibits that are both educational and fun. The museum has embraced the challenge of creating a contemporary children’s museum in a building that embodies the spirit of the Victorian age. The new museum offers 38,000 square feet of brand-new exhibits, the restored century-old Woodside Park Dentzel Carousel, on-site parking and a family-friendly restaurant.”

Really wanted to love the museum, was so impressed with the building, but in the end, was left cold.  There does not seem to be layering of information, it is “spin and run away activities”.  If you wanted to gain additional insight or find activities to do with kids they are not available.  Museums (including Children’s Museums) are keepers of culture, places for society to strive for the best.  By, including a McDonald’s Restaurant Exhibit Area in a children’s Museum is lowering the Museum to popular culture and without an ambition to find the best, popular culture becomes our best.