Children’s Creativity Museum
Many San Francisco museums hold special workshops for children or feature kid-friendly exhibits on a regular basis. The Children’s Creativity Museum, though, is geared entirely towards younger visitors and their families. Located on Fourth Street in the city, the museum extends an open invitation for all children to create, collaborate and communicate.
A welcoming and inclusive space, the facility features multiple labs and studios, as well as a theater and a gallery. In keeping with the museum’s mission of promoting 21st-century literacy, visitors can interact with and learn from nearly every element. Children can create their own stop-motion animation, engineer their own design from a “mystery box,” and can give life to an exhibit in the Community Lab.
At the Children’s Creativity Museum, there is no separation between art and innovation. Children who visit the center can work as a team to give a musical performance or construct their own chain reaction in a Rube Works Invention Game workshop. Additional opportunities for both knowledge and fun include learning how to code and building brain cell “neurons” out of everyday craft materials. For the youngest visitors, a workshop on wind chimes hones motor development while showing that design needn’t be age-restricted. There is also an early childhood education program that combines confidence, risk-taking and creativity for those 5 and under.
Creativity, of course, shouldn’t stop when childhood draws to a close, and the museum has recognized that through the special C.I.T.Y. program for teens. The initiative empowers teens to share the museum’s purpose with others while gathering invaluable experiences of their own. In the past, participants have completed projects in the fields of art, journalism and music, and have also fine-tuned their leadership and mentoring skills along the way.
With its emphasis on interactive involvement, the museum is an ideal spot for school field trips. There are several field trip options for schools, daycare providers and co-ops, ranging from hour-long “junior field trips” to full-scale, facilitated immersion in either clay animation, music video production, coding or invention.
The Children’s Creativity Museum can be found at 221 Fourth Street in San Francisco. They can be reached at (415) 820-3320 or via the web at creativity.org. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:00 – 4:00.