Happy...

Wishing you an abundantly joyful and PLAYful new year!

Challenge: Identify where in the Museum you can find each of these images!

PlayWatch: Block Builders

Story shared by MuseumCorps Educator Megan Beauregard

Two boys, ages 7 and 8, had just met each other in ThinkSpace and were building together with the unit blocks. They started out with a standard “building,” stacking blocks to build arches and paths. I observed and soon asked if I could help, which mostly entailed holding blocks in place for them.

The conversation I had with the boys as they built was very detailed and took many imaginative turns. When I asked one boy what was going to happen next, he told me step by step and prompted me to hold blocks as he did so. “Now, this is going to be the elevator. It works by pulling this lever and moving into this room...” They told me about halfway through that this was the Children's Museum.

This Museum was no easy task, either. Throughout their play, other children would come to the blocks and knock their masterpiece over. The boys waited patiently. Once the children left, they would go right back to rebuilding the Museum, bigger and better than the last one.

Within 20 minutes or so, the two boys had successfully made Providence Children’s Museum – with a face-lift! For the Museum now had 10 floors, an elevator, a slide, a secret passage and a swimming pool.

The final product used every single unit block, and this picture was taken right before a curious toddler knocked down the structure. The boys were okay with this, and they thanked me for the help before they went to explore the rest of ThinkSpace. This was a great way to break in one of the components of this new and exciting space!

PlayWatch: ThinkSpace Stories

These observations of kids’ creative play and focused spatial thinking in ThinkSpace were shared by Museum staff and AmeriCorps members.

Soma Cube

• Two brothers, ages 11 and 6, played with the Soma cube while their mother observed and told them to “think spatially.”  After the boys found a solution, their mom challenged them to find another one. 
• A grandmother and a 4-year-old had a great time figuring out the cube: “It took patience but it was so rewarding!”

Mystery Mazes

• A 6-year-old girl reported that she finished maze boxes 5, 6, 7 and 8 on her last visit and now wanted to do 1, 2, 3 and 4.  She was already on 3 and had lots of erasure marks on her paper from drawing diagrams of the mazes!
• The mazes were a hit with an 8-year-old boy who really loves drawing; he made good use of the answer keys, comparing them to his diagram and trying again.
• Devising a creative new challenge, a 7-year-old boy stacked two maze boxes end to end so he could get a ball to travel through both.

Shape Talk

• A father and daughter took turns being the speaker and listener, laughing and cheering when they got their patterns to match. 
• Another family – mom, dad and 10-year-old daughter – also traded roles.  The girl built a complex stacked structure and successfully described it so that her dad was able to replicate it.

Helping Kids Deal with Disaster

Our hearts go out to the families of Newtown, CT.  And as we hold our own little ones a bit closer, we wonder how to talk with them about something so dreadful and so inexplicable.  A number of organizations have shared good resources for parents and caregivers facing this daunting task. 

BrightStars, an organization that provides quality rating and improvement systems for Rhode Island's childcare and early learning programs, passed on this advice from behavioral consultant Haven Miles:

Instead of talking about details with very young children, use simple language and simple ideas.

• A really terrible thing happened.
• Sometimes adults do terrible things.
• Terrible things almost never happen.
• We will be sure that you are safe.

Some more resources:

• National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) – Coping with a School Shooting
• National Association of School Psychologists (NASP)
• Association of Children's Museums

– Janice O'Donnell, Executive Director

A Few of Our Favorite Things

Some of our favorite Shape Space activities were kept for ThinkSpace – all of them great spatial thinking tools:

Unit blocks are basic wooden blocks that kids of all ages and grown-ups love to play with. There’s a lot of research that shows their value. They’re completely open-ended. There’s an element of pretend or dramatic play.

Jovo® shapes snap together to make different polyhedra – triangles make a pyramid and squares make a cube. They’re a fantastic manipulative that demonstrates the relationship between the 2-D and 3-D worlds. Kids (and adults!) love to put their creations up on the show-off shelf to share what they've built.

Magna-Tiles® are magnetic and allow little kids to do something similar to Jovos with an easier mechanism for them. They also explore in different ways, stacking or lining them up.

The Shape Talk game prompts visitors to use spatial language, to think about and articulate spatial relations – where something goes in relation to something else.  There’s evidence that spatial language is incredibly important for spatial thinking. Spatial language is not just shape names but it’s also about location – above, below, between. It’s about movement – across, navigate, pathway. It’s about size – big, expand, high, little, long. It’s about orientation – around, down, horizontal. It’s about how things are curved or straight. It’s about congruence – whether something is alike or different or identical or similar. It’s about construction – creating, developing, making, placing. It’s about rotation – flipping, rotating, spinning, twisting. And it’s about transformation – distorting, squishing, transforming.

We’ve already observed a lot of visitors using spatial language and have seen a difference in how Shape Talk is being played in its new formation, and in how the other activities are being used. We look forward to seeing more great spatial play!

How Many? How Much?

We’re happy to welcome a clever new display created by Museum Exhibits Intern and Play Guide Sarah Oh, a junior in Industrial Design at RISD.  How Many? How Much? challenges visitors’ eyes and teases their brains as they count and estimate the quantities of intriguing objects stacked and packed in the Museum’s atrium walkway window boxes. Sarah reflected on her creative process and her work with Exhibits Director Robin Meisner.

How did you choose your materials and how to display them?

Robin and I wanted a combination of unusually shaped things and more commonplace objects that kids see at home or at school. We also wanted to combine manmade objects and natural objects. Then I thought of how to display them that would transform them from ordinary to something special.

What was your concept for the vibrant graphic panels you created to line the boxes?

I took inspiration from the colors I’ve seen around the Museum. I wanted a lot of variety, a lot of diversity in the shapes – some are radial, some are more linear and geometric, others are more curvy. I made all of the designs I could think of and matched them to displays. For objects I planned to display more radially, I matched them with tessellations.

I put mirrors on the sides of each box so the idea of spatial thinking and repetition of objects wasn’t confined to a box but could be extended into infinity, where the mirrors reflect one another.

What was the most challenging box? Your favorite box?

I think I spent more time on the boxes like the nuts and bolts and the clothespins and binder clips because those are very ordinary things. They were more fun, too – trying to display objects in a way that from far away they’re transformed into something else and then close up you get that “aha!” moment of recognizing what it is. My favorite was the animals – it was a lot of connecting to my inner child!

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Visitors have been quite engaged since the display debuted, eagerly peering into boxes to figure out what the objects are and guess their quantities. A grandfather with his grandson  commented, “You can see them on both sides – they really use the space beautifully!”

The boxes are paired with a hunt that challenges visitors to identify whole boxes based on a picture of part of their objects and a talk-back board that asks, “Do you wonder how many there are of something? What?”

Check back to see some of their wonderful responses, and thanks to Sarah for her beautiful work!

ThinkSpace is NOW OPEN!

Our vibrant new ThinkSpace exhibit has opened to rave reviews! We invited a dozen kids, ages 3 to 11, to come in for a sneak peek to test things out for us. Kids of all ages (and their grown-ups!) were intensely engaged in tackling building and design challenges, creating geometric patterns, solving puzzles, exploring shadows, navigating mazes and so much more. We were thrilled by their enthusiasm but also by the depth of their focus and concentration, and we witnessed lots of wonderful collaboration between kids and among adult/child pairs. We can tell that the activities will hold visitors’ attention for a long time, and that they’re going to come up with many interesting challenges of their own.

Some scenes from ThinkSpace...

Stacking, nesting and building with Wedgits – colorful octrahedron and rhombus-shaped blocks. Kids can try replicating designs on our challenge cards or come with their own constructions.

The Soma cube, a giant 3-D puzzle in which seven pieces fit together to form a cube. There are 240 distinct solutions, although it's a challenge to figure out even one – a challenge both kids and adults take very seriously! 

Arranging artfully painted wooden cubes to reproduce patterns or invent new designs.

Exploring the graphics on the navigation column.

Using the senses to guide a ball through the hidden twists and turns of the mystery maze boxes, then trying to map the path it traveled.

Creating intricate kaleidoscopic designs by layering, ordering and rotating colorful cutout shapes in countless combinations.

Experimenting with shadows and scale, transforming 3-D objects into 2-D representations and creating imaginative shadow scenes.

Constructing domino chain reactions, negotiating spacing and alignment to topple series of spirals and zigzags.

Building with wooden unit blocks in our brand-new block building area, designed to inspire even more creative construction.

And see the exhibit in action in this Providence Journal video:



You HAVE to come see ThinkSpace for yourselves – please let us know what you think, and which activities are your favorites!

Thank you to National Grid for their lead sponsorship of ThinkSpace, as well as to The June Rockewell Levy Foundation and everyone who supported the Thrive Drive for helping to make this new space a reality. 

Click here to learn about the inspiration for and process of creating ThinkSpace.