We took advantage of National Free Museum Day this weekend to visit the Boston Museum of Science with some friends and our son. It was a nostalgic visit for several of us who hadn’t been to the museum since our school days. While much remains the same at the MOS, there are rotating exhibits and lots of live and interactive shows to see.

Admission to the main exhibit halls is $20.00 for adults and $17.00 for kids 3-11 years old. Omni Theatre shows cost $9.00 (adults) and $7.00 (kids) with discounts on additional shows the same day.

The Exhibit Halls

With over 700 interactive exhibits, spread across the museum’s “Science Is an Activity” floor plan, every step of your stay at the Museum of Science is chock full of fun and learning. To aid visitor’s in navigating the 33 current exhibit’s and live shows, the museum has prepared an Early Learner’s Guide. This guide lists exhibits that are especially enjoyed by kids 8 and younger and provides a suggested order to visit to minimize backtracking. We’d suggest printing this out as a guide when planning your trip through the museum. You can find this list here. http://www.mos.org/discoverycenter/elg
Below are a few of our favorite exhibits.

The Discovery Center

Designed for kids up to 8, The Discovery Center offers hands-on activities that provide children the opportunity to learn by trial and error. Some of the areas are built for smaller children and some for older children, which is great for families with multiple children; the older ones will not complain of being bored here.

The lower floor has a special section for newborns from 0-12 months of age, complete with a rocking chair. Next to it is a ramp with some dress-up clothes, such as bees and animal fur vests. Children can also crawl under the ramp, which is very exciting when others are running above. This floor also has tanks with animals (we saw a frog and millipede) and a lit-up wall with colored rods for the kids to move and make designs with (think Lite-Brite, but really big).

Mathematica

This exhibit has been around since the museum opened in 1981 and is timeless in it’s ability to engage kids and adults in learning and experimenting with math. From the huge history of math wall to the soap bubbles forming on wire shapes, Mathematica is full of hands-on activities to teach math in an interactive way.

Science In The Park

The park-like setting of this exhibit invites kids to swing, jump, see-saw, and run on playground equipment to learn about the forces that put things in motion. Your kids can run a race against others or try to keep pace with moving lights to learn about speed and acceleration. They can hop on the see-saw to learn about balance and the fulcrum or spin on a metal plate to learn about momentum.

A Bird’s World

On the lower level of the Museum, this exhibit takes you on a virtual tour of Acadia National Park and displays every species of bird in North America. Make sure you check out the “Sneaking Corridor” to see how good your stalking skills are.

Seeing Is Deceiving

From spinning wheels to M.C. Escher drawings, this exhibit features dozens of images and optical illusions that will trick your eyes and boggle your mind. Several computer work stations give you a more in depth look at how some of these illusions work into tricking our brains into seeing what we do and several of the exhibits allow you to ‘take apart’ the illusion to understand how it works. This one is for older kids and adults and is on the top level of the museum along one of the hallway walls.

Food

The food court offers several different options including Wolfgang Puck’s pizza, burgers, hot dogs, fish and chips, BBQ-style sandwiches, and a full salad bar. We found the prices to be reasonable considering it is a museum and the wide variety of options made it easy to please everyone in our group.

Overall Thoughts

We will always be huge fans of the Museum of Science and visit at least once a year to see what is new. Some of the exhibits are a bit dated (computer revolution), but the classic exhibits continue to deliver on their goal of educating kids and getting them excited about science. Check the website for current events and live shows as you’ll want to catch shows that interest you and are included in your admission price. We’ll cover the planetarium and Omni theatre in another post, but it’s always good to try and include a visit to either of those when you come to Museum of Science.

If you plan to visit more than once a year, think about the membership. It comes with 2 hours of free parking with each trip, which is just enough time for a quick visit, as well as passes to the planetarium and the Omni theatre.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.