I have tried to do something fun with Kaelyn every Friday since she doesn't have autism summer camp on Fridays. I knew that there was some kind of children's museum in Jensen Beach so we decided to check it out. It is small but it is super cool and Kaelyn had a blast there. One whole side of the building is set up like a town and kids can dress up and pretend they're doing different jobs. There was a garage with a taxi with its hood up. You could unscrew the tires and take them off and change them, pretend to change the oil and several other things. Then there was a kid's sized grocery store stocked with real sized boxes and containers of pretend food. The house had three different house building projects you could do. There were stencils and paper so you could design your own blueprint, there were building blocks, and then these large conncectable slats of wood where you could build larger structures. There was a toddler beach themed play area, a vet, a health/learning room, a pretend post office area and a firetruck right in the center. The other side of the building had a huge ship that you could climb up in and learn and practice doing all kinds of things that sailors used to do on ships. There were plastic balls that you could load into the ship's cannons and shoot them and they landed down on the floor level. Kaelyn didn't want to try that because it was too loud for her but I thought it looked like a lot of fun. This is just the first part of the pictures I am going to post.
There was a full firefighter's outfit the kids could put on (a picture of that later).
Kaelyn LOVED the veterinarian clinic. Here she is getting an animal from one of the kennels. They had lots of different kinds of stuffed animals in the kennels for kids to use. Of course Kaelyn already had a couple of her ever-present pals with her.
She decided to use Garmin and Kecky the first time she played in there.
Listening to Garmin's heart.
Notice the x-ray illuminator behind her (and yes, I totally had to google what those are called). It was divided into two sides and you could turn the light on and off for either side. There was a pocket with a bunch of x-rays of various kinds of animals below the board.
Dr. Mosenthin :-)
These were all the bins of doctors tools and you can also see all the lab coats hanging there for kids to wear. There were blood pressure cuffs, needles, tweezers, stethoscopes along with other things that I don't begin to know the proper terms for. :-)
(For instance, the reflex hit your knee thingy - see what I mean?) :-D
They had the perfect size carts, a kid-sized register and bakery counter, and all the shelves were on the kids' level. I love the small scale produce scale (forgive the pun).
Getting some fresh produce from the refrigerator area.
Paying for her stuff. As for the cashier, it was just kind of whichever kid was there and wanted to do it. Surprisingly, most of the kids seemed to enjoy filling their carts (shopping) and there wasn't a big demand to be the cashier. When we came back in later, there was a whole line of kids waiting to "pay" and the current cashier was ready to leave so several of the kids asked Kaelyn if she wanted to do it and she was the cashier for awhile (more pictures of that later as well).
The post office wasn't actually a separate room. It was just these boxes and there were outfits you could put on and mail to sort and deliver. The cool thing about it was that each place (the house, grocery store, garage, etc.) had a mailbox and there was lots of mail addressed to the different places. Kaelyn didn't spend long doing this but I saw some of the kids sorting mail, putting it in the bags and carrying it all over to the different places.
She just put the outfit on to humor me so I could get a couple pictures, thus the pictures I got weren't very good because she was distracted and ready to move on to something else.
This was in the house. In all the different places, there were lots of posters that taught all kinds of things so besides learning by playing, there was a lot of other things kids could learn by reading about stuff.
This was right down Kaelyn's line of interest. On one wall of the house, they had things explaining the process of building houses. On another wall they had pictures and descriptions of different kinds of Florida houses throughout the years. But on this wall, they had an activity where you could match each kid from a different part of the world to what kind of house he or she lives in. The "thumbtacks" on the map showed where they lived and there was a description of what kind of house they lived in next to their pictures. Then you had to look at the pictures of the houses below and try to guess which kind of house went with each kid. You lifted it up to see if you were right and read more about it. Kaelyn loves maps and is very interested in other countries so she enjoyed seeing the different style houses.
The "outside" of the house.
The ship.
Kaelyn really had fun with this activity on the ship. There was a sign explaining how sailors would use different flags for different letters to convey mesages. The sign had a whole code of the different flags for each letter of the alphabet. The barrel had all the different flags so you could find the flags for whatever letters you wanted (for instance, your initials). The flags had little loops on them so you could just clip them on and then raise and lower the flags. I think you could put up to three different letters (flags) on at one time.
This was in the room about your body/health. Most of the stuff was a little "too old" for Kaelyn's interest but this was kind of interesting to her. You sat on the bike and pedaled and it was connected to the skeleton on the bike so you could see what your bones are doing as you are pedaling a bike.
The firefighter outfit. It was a regular uniform donated by the Port St. Lucie fire department so it was huge on her. The helmets were just pretend ones though of course. Since the coat went all the way down to her ankles, there was no way we were getting the pants/suspenders on her. :-)
Changing a tire on the taxi.
Getting a new tire off the rack.
These were some of the tools you could use. I have a couple nephews that I think would LOVE this particular thing and could probably spend a lot more time "working on" the car!!!
In the same parking lot as the museum, there is a free water fountains play area for kids besides the fact that all of it is along the Indian River. Several years ago, we took Kaelyn to play in the fountains a few different times. At that time, they were in the process of finishing the inside of the children's musem. After Kaelyn had played in the museum for an hour or two, she wanted to go play in the fountains. So I sat under a big tree and read while she played. Then we walked down into the river, which is only about shin deep on me for a good ways out. She cooled off and played in the water for a bit, then she wanted to go back into the museum and play. Your admission to the museum is good all day and lots of people were doing both. We went back and she played a while longer. She tried a couple things she hadn't done yet and of course, I got more pictures so I'll be posting fountain pictures and a few more museum pictures next time.
