Child's Play Child's Play Children's museums throughout the Midwest offer magical worlds of exploration and discovery. It's a sunny, beautiful day in downtown St. Paul, Minn., but there's trouble brewing underground. An ant colony is preparing to defend itself against a huge, invading insect, and soldier ants are hurriedly building a barricade at the tunnel entrance. As the parent of two young children, I'm delighted that kid-friendly museums seem to be popping up faster than mushrooms after rain. Though children's museums trace their origin to the opening of the Brooklyn Children's Museum in 1899, the past 15 years have brought an unprecedented blossoming of inventiveness in their exhibits, themes and architecture.
Midwestern kids are fortunate to have many fine museums to visit.
Here's a selection of the region's major children's museums. OHIO One of the newest museums is Cincinnati's Cinergy Children's Museum, which opened in October 1998 in the lower level of the city's stately Union Terminal. Two Ohio museums specialize in science education for children, COSI Columbus and COSI Toledo. The Centers of Science and Technology emphasize an interactive approach to scientific learning. Children stargaze in a planetarium, crawl through a windpipe tunnel and journey under the earth in a coal mine.