Winston-Salem Museum Experience

Visiting the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem was a wonderful experience. Their mission is “inspiring wonder, curiosity, and lifelong learning in our children and community through interactive play and discovery”. In my opinion, they are right in keeping with this mission. The museum opened in 2004 and just recently celebrated their ten year anniversary. They have about 13,000 visitors every year. Unlike most museums, because this is specifically a children’s museum, there is an admission fee for children over the age of twelve months. The most interesting thing I observed was the Kaleidoscape which was a hand-crocheted hanging playground by Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam. I found this piece so interesting because it uniquely brought together …show more content…
From our short visit, and speaking with the executive director, it seems that the Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem has a lot of passion for their work. A lot of this is particularly related to the upcoming merger of the Children’s Museum and SciWorks. Something that stuck out to me was when the director made the point that all education is connected. So even though the Children’s Museum is not focused on science, science is still incorporated. Because of this, I believe that the merger of the Children’s Museum and SciWorks will be extremely successful. In class, we talked about the important of the physical location of museum. SciWorks and the Children’s Museum have taken this into account and desire to become a family anchor in the development of downtown. Boas states in his article that the more unessential things in a museum, the more attention is taken away from the objects. The Children’s museum follows this school of thought. While it is a museum specifically for children (who are known to have very short attention spans), the exhibits are not overwhelming, but give visitors the opportunity to enjoy every part of that exhibit without having to immediately move onto the next. We discussed interpretations a lot in class, and one of the most significant differences about the Children’s museum in relation to other museums is that there are no text interpretations for the objects or exhibits. This fits