The Children’s Museum in Easton packs hours of hands-on activities and learning into an Old Fire Station in North Easton, MA. The cost is $6.00 per person (over 1) for the day, and for $60.00 you can get a family membership for 2 for a year.

Inside the museum you will find three floors of interactive exhibits. Next to the museum is an outdoor learning center called ‘The Wild Place,’ which is open from April through November. The Wild Place is a park with at least 10 different learning areas, ranging from paleontology to nature tic-tac-toe to musical pieces of wood. They also have several picnic tables for group lunching and snacking. We’d recommend visiting on a nice day so you can spend time in this area.

You enter the museum on the ground floor, where you pay at the desk and jump right into the activities. Among the things you’ll find here are a replica train, a large wooden train track, a pretend camp and cabin (completely with tent, fire pit, and story books), a performance stage, a fishing boat, a puppet theatre, and one of the highlights – a Rube Goldberg-like set of chutes, chimes, and tunnels that your kids can send golf balls through. The cool part is that to send the balls into this apparatus you have to climb about ten feet up a set of stairs. There is also a real fireman’s pole that your kids can climb to ring the bell at the top.

Downstairs is split between an eating area, which is open during lunch-time hours, and the FETCH! Lab. Based on the PBS Kids show, this area features various science experiments and loads of puzzles. A museum employee was actively showing kids and parents what to do. Bring your own food as they don’t sell any, but have a nice area to eat.

The top floor is geared a bit towards the older kids with a room dedicated to everything wood. Hammer nails into pieces of wood or lock a piece of wood into the vice to saw some off. The room next to it serves as a doctor’s office, complete with an incubator for the baby dolls. Another large room is dedicated to arts and crafts with lots of different projects to do. From paper and markers to cloth and pipe cleaners, this area was staffed with a museum employee to help out the kids or give parents some tips. The remaining area is for free play. There is a padded corner for the youngest visitors to play in while the older ones play in the kitchen, on the fire truck (with the dalmations!), or in a treehouse-like structure.

Mom Says: I like that they proactively offer hand sanitizer and a sign encouraging its use before you even walk in the door. It was great to see a staff member working with families in the arts & crafts and giving them ideas.

Dad Says: This is worth a trip and if you live nearby, I’d think about a membership. We could have easily spent close to a full day here between the museum and the park area. This isn’t the biggest facility, so I assume on rainy days it gets crowded.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Places to Go, Playplaces. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feed , or if you would rather receive an e-mail, please subscribe to the e-mail in the lower right hand corner of this page. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.