Chesapeake Children's Museum: High Aspirations
By Effie Dawson
January 27, 1995
WHEN A CHILD arrives at the Chesapeake Children's Museum in Annapolis, he pulls on a yellow rain slicker, rubber boots and life jacket, slips a rope off a wooden piling and launches a scaled-down tugboat.
He spins the wheel, hoists nets filled with oyster shells and adjusts lines on a nearby dinghy.
Technically, of course, the tug stays pretty well grounded on the carpeted lobby of the storefront museum. But the youngster on board gets a taste of life as a Chesapeake Bay waterman.
The bay is one of the themes of this four-month-old museum set in a shopping center on the edge of Annapolis.
The Chesapeake Children's Museum is a collection of play areas offering hands-on learning about scientific and cultural topics, many related to nature past and present.
Here kids strap on 12-foot cloth"dinosaur tails"and imagine themselves as Tyrannosaurus Rex. They make clay molds of otter, deer and duck tracks. They play a game guessing animal sounds. And the littlest visitors can smack at soft fabric fish suspended from the ceiling in the"Minnows"play area for babies.
"It's a way to educate young people as well as adults as to our responsibilities to the environment,"said Deborah Wood, founder and president of the museum.
There's nothing off limits. Volunteers compare it to the Capital Children's Museum near Union Station and other youth centers where hands-on exhibits gently educate young people about history, geography and science.
"The whole goal is for parents and children or caregivers and children to interact,"said Robyn Modly, one of the volunteers steering this still-evolving museum.
But comparing the Annapolis museum to the Washington version is a bit like calling a dinghy a yacht.
This new museum is small, its future unsteady.
Wood, a former nursery school teacher, proposed the museum two years ago while looking for activities for her own two children. She had visited the Capital Children's Museum and"was just overwhelmed because it was a huge building that was completely childproof."
"When we moved out here {to Annapolis}, I just felt there wasn't a place that was appropriate for children,"Wood said.
She and some other parents created a traveling museum for festivals and fairs in Anne Arundel County. There children listened to taped frog choruses, fashioned bird feeders from pine cones and made hats from recycled paper while parents learned about the museum project. Officers were named and the museum was approved as a nonprofit organization.
Then last summer, the museum found a temporary home at Odenton Elementary School, through a school program that encourages the use of the building for nonprofit cultural activities.
During the five weeks in the school, Wood's network of volunteers grew, an honorary board was formed, and the search began for a permanent home for the museum.
The museum reopened in September when the property managers of Festival at Riva offered temporary use of a 2,200 square-foot storefront. Wood obtained the tug, dinghy and some other exhibits from the Baltimore Children's Museum at the Cloisters in Brooklandville, Md., which recently closed while preparing to make way for a new children's museum slated to open in 1997 near Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
Neighboring stores pitched in with supplies while volunteers hammered, painted and collected recycled and natural materials for crafts.
But if a retailer wants to lease the space, the museum will have seven days to vacate, Modly said.
Still, museum organizers remain confident about its future.
"Unless museums have a lot of money, this is how they begin,"Modly said.
Since September, the museum has averaged about 10 visitors a day. Admission is $3 per person, with children under 1 free.
There are nine theme areas, most of them appropriate for preschool children.
"There's nothing like this anywhere around here,"said Heather Faughnan of Annapolis as her daughter Brittany, 3, played with castanets and a tambourine in the"'Round the World"room, which highlights a different country each month.
Another recent adult visitor, Melissa Harmina of Arnold, said she wasn't impressed by the small museum and its limited attractions. But her 8-month-old daughter and a 4-year-old boy she baby-sits liked it enough that she returned a second time.
The under-5 set seems to enjoy the waterman exhibit most. It's the most complete play area, including scaled-down equipment like that used on oyster boats. A mural of the bay fills one wall, and a real, great blue heron nest sits near a painting of the majestic water bird.
The"Bay Window"room explores wildlife from the Chesapeake region. Tapes play calls from animals that inhabit the woods and marshes near the bay. Plastic models of mallard, fox and bald eagle feet enable children to make tracks in sand or clay.
"Express Yourself"is an arts and crafts area overflowing with natural and recycled material to create painted oyster shells, tracings of ducks and sculptures made with pine cones and feathers.
Other sections cover areas beyond the bay theme. Glow-in-the-dark constellations cover the walls and ceiling in one play area, medical supplies contribute to education about health and nutrition in another. The"Hard Hats"room is stocked with building blocks.
Most activities require parental involvement."That's how we're different from Discovery Zone,"Wood said."They have paid staff who take over for you. We're not that."
Exceptions are the science and nature workshops, which began this year, and provide 45-minute programs, such as"What's a Volcano?"and"Slimers,"which parents do not have to attend. The museum has one paid position but operates mostly with volunteers.
Wood said she's trying to obtain some computers to create more activities for older children. And she is working on a more permanent address for the museum. She has her eyes on Sandy Point State Park. A few years back, then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer targeted the park for an environmental education center. Although the center was not funded during Schaefer's term, there's still interest in the project, Wood said.
She hopes to see her fledgling project grow right along with the children who visit it.
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