Putting the Fun Back in Learning

BY CHRIS VOMVOLAKIS

SINCE OPENING ITS DOORS in 2012, the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County (CMOSC) has become Santa Rosa’s premier destination for learning through direct experience play, welcoming over 150,000 parents, caregivers, educators and families each year. Through their interactive exhibits and engaging educational programs, CMOSC has been dedicated to inspiring young minds to learn about the world around them, stimulate creativity and curiosity, and to discover the world through playful exploration of the arts and sciences.

CMOSC is a place where children can do the serious work of learning through play. A person who holds a place in many of our childhood and parenting memories, Fred Rogers said, “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.” CEO and Founder Collette Michaud agrees and emphasizes that CMOSC is the perfect place for children to learn through play. She is a huge believer in out-of-school experiences that involve play and their ability to shape us—that we all have the inherent and biological need to play to be fulfilled and happy.

Under Michaud’s leadership CMOSC is brimming with one-of-a-kind educational experiences that are truly unlike any other. From painting with shaving cream and jamming on a drum set made of recyclable materials to playing inside a real helicopter, CMOSC promises that kiddos will leave with tons of memories and a little extra knowledge.

Her proudest moment was when CMOSC secured a 1.8 million dollar grant from the State of California to build an outdoor nature space on an acre of land at the Children’s Museum. The grant gave them the confidence to move forward on construction even though CMOSC was not a fully operating museum at the time. Michaud proudly recounts creating “Mary’s Garden” way ahead of schedule, and in 2016, it was named “Best place in the world for children that is not a playground” by Landscape Architecture online.

To local and visiting families alike this outdoor play area is the big draw. An expansive playground with a butterfly theme (“Mary” is short for mariposa, the Spanish word for butterfly), roughly half of the area revolves around a replica of the Russian River, a self-filtering water feature that trickles into a pond with living plants and flowers.

On one side of this river, there’s a selfdraining gravel pit where kids can play with rocks and use gutters and other toys to manipulate water bubbling up from fountains. On the other side, a series of hands-on water-play tables give kids the chance to use hand pumps, tubing, and other toys to learn about gravity and physics. The river is populated with sardine-size plastic fish, which kids are encouraged to extract with nets or bare hands or both. It serves as an interactive, aquatic ecosystem that provides outdoor fun and playful exploration.

The goal of this waterfall and stream

system is to connect children and adults to water in their environment by replicating the Russian River watershed. The water feature captures and filters rainwater while attracting local wildlife such as butterflies, dragonflies, and frogs. The entire stream is recirculated through a large wetland filtration system, showcasing the importance of native wetlands to the health of local aquatic ecosystems.

Within Mary’s Garden, a citation notes, children “can be involved in the plantgrowing process by planting, feeding and watering vegetation. They can fish, run and learn from nature.” Elsewhere, Mary’s features an area with giant Styrofoam blocks that kids can use to build forts and Rube Goldberg machines, and an area where children can erect teepees under the shade of a giant oak tree. There’s even an actual garden where kids can learn more about certain produce, then pick and eat it.

Adjacent to Mary’s Garden is the arts studio, a reconstructed farmhouse that

features different themed projects every week and even includes an area where kids can paint right on the windows! One week, projects can incorporate recycled materials from across Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. The next, a project can revolve around old newspaper.

Over in the Ernest L. and Ruth W. Finley Science & Imagination Gallery, kids can immerse in a world of discovery through a combination of imaginative play spaces and interactive exhibits based on scientific principles. Children can entertain their parents with a live show in the puppet theater or cook up a healthy “pretend” meal in the café. Kids will also enjoy building various structures in the hardware store or watching busy honeybees work in the live beehive, shoot large pollen balls across the gallery with wind cannons or brush a crocodile’s teeth in the dental lab. Other exhibits include a train car, light peg wall, tree house, health lab, magnet table and much more.

And for the little, little ones, there’s TOTopia, the toddler-only play space designed specifically for the developmental needs of children ages 30 months or younger. Crawlers and toddlers can explore a tide pool water discovery area, a sensory table, a ball wall, a storybook cottage and more.

With over 7,000 square feet of interior space, coupled with 36,000 square feet of outdoor areas, there’s no shortage of exhibits and activities to explore at the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County, helping it easily achieve its objective of inspiring curiosity and creativity in children through joyful, transformative experiences.