An Interview with Chris Sancomb

Recently MuseumCorps educator Kevin Broydrick sat down with Chris Sancomb, Museum exhibit designer and fabricator, to talk about Underland, the newest Museum exhibit opening in June.

Tell me about your role at the Museum.
I’m the exhibit designer and fabricator. When we plan new exhibits I design all of the components and the environments. I also build all of the exhibits or contract local artists or craftspeople to help me with the fabrication of everything and then I maintain those exhibits.

Chris at work in the shop, on a mastodon skeleton

What makes Underland unique?
Underland is so much about the pretend play environment, with lots of loose parts and components that inspire pretend play. It’s less about components that stand alone. The environment is very sculptural and rich and there’s a lot of carving and art in this exhibit. We’re making all sorts of tools and utensils that can be used for pretend play. We’re having great costumes made so kids can become the creatures that live in this area. Everything is native; it’s all animals that would live in this region.

Carved wooden chairs and utensils

What have been your inspirations in designing Underland?
In content, a lot of children’s literature inspired it. Stories like Beatrix Potter’s and Watership Down, any kind of underground creatures that generate this fantasy world. Visual influence has been everything from Pan’s Labyrinth to one of the Narnia movies where there was a badger living under a tree, even more recent things like The Fantastic Mr. Fox – anything that can shape that visual environment. The natural world in general had an influence. There’s so much good visual material in the natural world, it was easy to start taking that and putting it all together.

A mural of the burrow wall

Tell me about the team of assistants and volunteers you have helping you design and fabricate the exhibit.
I’ve got a couple of people I’ve hired and several who are volunteers. I’ve got people with backgrounds in sculpture and carving, wood carving and stone carving. I’ve also got someone who’s a painter so he’ll be helping with a lot of the finish on certain elements. I’ve even got a volunteer who came to me with experience working with LEDs, which is exactly what the chandelier is made of, so this ready-made expert walked in and took our idea and has been helping with the development the whole way through. We put out a call for artists and found three Rhode Island artists who are designing various components. It’s very “Rhode Island” through and through, and it’s got a good feeling to it.

Chandeliers in progress

What’s your favorite aspect of Underland?
All of the natural wood is fantastic. We’re using an organic linseed finish on everything so it’s a very healthy exhibit in a lot of ways. It’s great being able to work with natural material as opposed to, say, cabinet making where you’re using a lot of plywood and solvent-based finishing. All the natural material coupled with the imaginative aspect of the pretend play environment is going to make this exhibit really fun.

Underland raw materials

Click here to learn about the process of planning this new exhibit. And stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes Underland updates!

A Year of Growth

Last night Museum Board members, staff and volunteers celebrated the tremendous accomplishments of 2009 at our annual meeting. It's always exciting to look back at what we've done in a year but last night made us especially proud because we responded to a time of great uncertainty with creativity and innovation, which allowed us to welcome a record number of visitors, expand our reach in the community, and further our advocacy about the importance of children's unstructured play.

Take a look at some of last year's highlights, in words and photos:

Click here to download our 2009 Annual Report and get the full story on last year's accomplishments.

Hitting the Nail on the Head

This story was shared by Museum Early Childhood Program Developer Mary Scott Hackman.

For a Museum woodworking program, I set up three stations: one where children sanded blocks of wood, one where they created things with different-sized pieces of wood, and a third station that consisted of a tree stump (a real one with the bark removed), some nails and a bunch of adult-sized hammers. I wondered, what will happen if a child hits his or her thumb? What will our adult visitors think? At some point, will I have to remove the stump and reduce the children's experience to just two activities?

Well, the stump turned out to be the hit of the program! Once a child had a hammer, he or she did not want to give it up. A mom noticed her 9-year-old daughter at the stump. Not only was she doing a superb job of wielding the hammer, she had taken it upon herself to line up nails for the smaller children to drive. She was the queen of the stump! She knew what she was doing and she knew how to help the younger kids gathered at her side. I observed the young children's faces, watching in awe as the girl set up the nails, one by one, giving directions as she tapped another nail lightly into place, saying, “Now, you can drive it the rest of the way in,” and handing her hammer to someone in the crowd.

These kids could have been standing in a factory. They could have been out in the yard, fixing the fence. But they were here at the Children's Museum, looking powerful, taking charge with a hammer and nails, not getting hurt, just getting into the experience and looking just a bit taller at the stump!

As an educator, I have learned that I need to take risks if children are going to take them. As I stood at a slight distance taking in the scene at the stump, I heard a mom remark, “Look what I can do with things from our backyard!” When we step aside, provide real materials for children to use, they rise up and direct their own experiences. We need to give them room. Kids want to be big. We need to get out of their way. And if they occasionally hit their thumbs, so be it.

Talking Back - Kitchen Play

How does your family play together in the kitchen? Here's what some of our visitors – adults and kids – had to say, on the Talk Back board in Play Power:

Tales of the Lost & Found

And now, for some belated April foolishness... Recently RI Monthly contacted us to find out about our most unusual lost and found items for a feature in their April issue. (We made the top of their list!)

So I asked staff, “What interesting, weird (or wet?!?) things have you seen?” Here’s what they had to say.

From former Experience Coordinators with particularly vivid (and shared) memories of some of our stranger sightings in the Lost & Found collection:

The strangest things I ever found: a (clean) baby diaper filled with sliced apples, a floor-length fur-trimmed coat, and many, many single shoes.  These were often larger then toddler size, meaning some 6-year old walked out of the Museum wearing only one shoe.
–Arielle

I mean, we had a lot of kids turn up there. The mainstay was sippy cups and princess-related accessories, but I do recall finding a single shoe and, on another occasion, a tiny pair of underwear. Oh, and Cheerios.
–Aaron

My favorite was definitely the giant fur coat!
–Hannah

I can only remember the gory stuff...used nappies, full lunches with mold and a green curly wig?
–Suzanne

A white, floor length fur coat!  It was quite formal.  How do you forget your fur coat?  And why do you wear it to the Children's Museum?
–Laura H.

A necklace with a baby tooth as the pendant.
Lots of earmuffs. Lots. I felt like I was drowning in earmuffs.
–Laura N.

And some tales of unusual things seen in exhibits by our current staff and AmeriCorps members:

I found the pelvic bone from Bone Zone on a child's head as a crown. I don't know if that counts!
–Merideth

One day walking through Coming to Rhode Island I noticed that the Colonial gallery looked rather empty. Where was the furniture?  Across the time tunnel, the mill house was also devoid of furniture.  I checked out the ship and there it was - the Colonial settle, stool and butterchurn, the mill workers' chairs, bench and washtubs - all piled up in the hold of the packet ship! 
–Janice

I've seen ALL of the Coming to Rhode Island food spilling from the ship's pot. And as I began to put it away, a band of kids formed to help me reorganize. I think they liked feeling like they were behind the scenes and responsible for the Museum.
–Annie

One time a man was here with his very young daughter (just over a year old).  During their visit, she lost a little pink shoe and as they left they asked us to be on the lookout for it.  About a week later, I was cleaning under the ship and spotted the shoe in the crate with the chicken!
– Carole Ann

A couple of weeks ago, I found a clam from Coming to Rhode Island floating down the tubes of the toddler tank in Water Ways.  I found it funny, but also very fitting
–Zack

Check out some other surprising discoveries, made when we dismantled our exhibits during building renovations.

Getting a Head Start at the Museum

This post was contributed by the Museum’s Head Start team: AmeriCorps Museum Educators Gina, Jenny, Jess and Kerrie and their supervisor, Early Childhood Program Developer Mary Scott Hackman. Together they serve the more than 1,300 preschool children in the greater Providence Head Start program.

A Pre-Visit Orientation (PVO) is the first interaction we have with a Head Start class. Each classroom we enter greets us with a whirlwind of energy and excitement that makes us, in turn, excited to be there. We start with a rhyming story and song that describes each Museum exhibit and calls for notable Museum characters to “join our parade!” We rarely get through the entire story without the children chiming in to tell us how much they would love to join, too. Often children will point to a picture of an exhibit and say, “I want to be in there!”
The final step to a PVO is to let the children play with toys from the Museum. This tends to be the children’s favorite part and is the hardest for us as activity leaders to bring to an end because it is so enjoyable to watch children become owls and skunks and construction workers and build us houses and cars of Magnatiles and circus blocks. By the end of our 30-minute visit, the children can’t stop chattering about when they’ll visit us at the Museum and we leave their classroom feeling rewarded by their joy and looking forward to their field trip.
– Jenny

Field Trips are one of the most rewarding (though tiring!) aspects of working as a Head Start team member. After we have visited kids at their center classroom and introduced them to the Museum, they get to visit us and experience the fun and exhibits themselves! Each of us leads a group of seven to nine Head Start children through the exhibits along with their teachers, assistants and chaperones. Many of the children have never been to the Museum before and this always elicits exclamations of “Wow!” “This is awesome!” and “I love this place!” They tend to notice Museum details that even we have forgotten, and their enthusiasm for imaginative play is truly contagious. There is nothing quite like the sight of wide-eyed 4-year-olds encountering the air tubes for the first time or the sound of boisterous giggling that inevitably takes place in front of our funny mirrors. The hardest part of each visit is saying good-bye, but we encourage the children to come back with their families again and again!
– Gina

Over the course of our AmeriCorps year we have the opportunity to develop and implement 10 Training Workshops for Head Start center teachers and assistants. This year the team chose a “Back to Nature” theme to encourage teachers to use natural resources as play tools both in and outside the classroom. Each workshop involves 15-20 teachers and lasts 40-50 minutes. It begins with a group activity of “music making” using all natural instruments including maracas and water shakers. Next Mary shares the benefits of physical activity and open-ended play in nature for children’s social development. Then the activities begin and teachers learn exciting new things to bring back to their classrooms, like how to make sand dough, terrariums and paint with pine cones. No one leaves empty handed, each teacher takes away what they made, open-ended questions to ask their kids, and a packet of a dozen new activities to try. All the while collegial conversations between teachers inspire new ideas for activities and ways to support their children.
– Kerrie

In addition to our pre-visit orientations and field trips, we lead two different Classroom Activities over the course of the year with each of our 55 Head Start rooms. We designed our lessons around a science theme, which was voted most desired by Head Start teachers. For our first activity, we chose to investigate weather – specifically rain, thunder and lightning. The children explore creative writing with a group poem, pretend to be a storm in a movement exercise and participate in a rain art activity. This is often the highlight of the lesson as children are able to draw their own pictures and use colored water and pipettes to simulate rain on their pages. In our second lesson, we introduce children to the life cycle of a frog through a book, a felt pond, a collage activity, a movement exercise and a song. It’s a busy 40 minutes but we have a lot of fun. Each room we visit teaches us new ways to improve, so our activity is constantly growing and changing (just like the frog itself!)
– Jess and Gina

On Family Nights, hundreds of excited Head Start children get to introduce their moms, dads, and siblings to the Museum and their special Museum teachers. They come in for dinner – pizza, pasta, cheese and crackers, fruit and pastry donated by area restaurants, provided free of charge to families. During the course of the evening, everyone can sign up for a free pass to come back to the Museum as often as they want for a whole year. Another wonderful aspect of Family Nights is that the children’s Head Start teachers volunteer alongside the AmeriCorps team to provide a great experience for our families. The teachers serve food, assist in exhibits or distribute free passes to families. It’s a tremendous collaborative effort. This year, we had 1,100 visitors on three Head Start Family Nights – fantastic evenings where the Museum turns into the “city square” and everyone enjoys food, fun and family!
–Mary

The hard-working, high-spirited Head Start team!

Film Screening Canceled

Due to flooding at and around the University of Rhode Island, tonight's (3/30) screening/discussion of "Where Do the Children Play?" at URI is canceled. The event will be rescheduled once the university reopens.

In the meantime, please mark your calendars for these upcoming screenings and discussions:

Wednesday, April 28 | 6:30 - 8:30 PM
St. Luke’s School
10 Waldron Avenue
Barrington, RI 02806
(401) 246-0990

Tuesday, May 18 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM
William Hall Library
1825 Broad Street
Cranston, RI 02905
(401) 781-2450

For more information, contact Megan Fischer at fischer@childrenmuseum.org.