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Children's Museum of New Hampshire

~ A leader in distinctive experiential learning and a catalyst for lifelong learning.

Children's Museum of New Hampshire

Author Archives: Xanthi Gray

Anyone Can Grow Food!

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by Xanthi Gray in Learning, Parenting

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Tags

children, Children's Museum of NH, family learning, fruits, gardening, healthy eating, outdoor learning, vegetables

Growing your own fruits and vegetables means that you know exactly what goes into your food and exactly where it comes from. This offers peace of mind to families who are concerned about feeding pesticides and genetically modified foods to their children. Not only that, having a home garden promotes good nutrition and gives families an activity that they can take part in and enjoy together.

Families are also motivated to grow their own food to stretch their food budgets. According to the US Department of Agriculture, for every $1 spent on seeds and fertilizer, home gardeners can grow an average of $25 worth of produce! That can be a significant saving for families and a great rationale for getting started.

Wanting to inspire as many growers as possible, we’ve constructed our own fruit and vegetable gardens along the river behind the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire. We are partnering with Master Gardener Leslie Stevens to offer a FREE six-part series covering everything from seed starting and building your own raised beds, to composting and maintaining your own home gardens. Three raised beds will produce food for our visitors to help monitor, maintain, and watch flourish, all while learning the ins and outs of gardening.

The children who participated in our most recent session enthusiastically planted snap peas and potatoes. During the next session, we will be adding tomatoes and strawberries to our outdoor beds. Future sessions will cover helping plants grow and how to harvest fresh produce when it is ripe.

Families are invited to stop by the Museum’s front desk and find out how to can join our Growing Gardeners Club at any time this summer. We hope families will be inspired to see what can blossom in their own home garden.

Our Evolving Kid’s World Cafe

16 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by Xanthi Gray in Exhibits, Learning

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children's museum, cultural learning, exhibits, family learning, kids, Mexican, Mexico, museum, museum educator, recipes, world cultures

The idea for the first Kid’s Café came about in 1995 at the Children’s Museum in Portsmouth in a tiny alcove under the stairs. What began as a simple table-top kit with food items to sort utilizing the food pyramid quickly turned into a full-blown exhibit highlighting other cultures from around the world.

I remember, as a floor staff member, watching the children play with the food and having them request more items to role-play with. We quickly added plates, napkins and utensils and watched a whole new exhibit come to life.

With the increasing popularity of the mini Café and a desire to bring more cultural activities to our space, the Café soon moved to the 3rd floor of the Portsmouth museum and became a more substantial exhibit called the Kid’s World Café. There we offered food from Japan, Canada, Germany, Turkey and Mexico.

When the Museum relocated to Dover, as an exhibit team, we knew that we wanted to bring the idea of the Kid’s World Café with us. With increasing emphasis on global societies and understanding and appreciating world cultures, our exhibit team created an area called One World that encompassed several exhibits, including the Kid’s World Café. One World includes interactive components that offer educational opportunities for families to learn about masks, clothing, footwear and food from seven cultures of the world. In the summer of 2008, we opened the new museum and the Kid’s World Café introduced visitors to the Greek culture.

In September of 2011, wanting to bring updated changes to this popular exhibit, the Kid’s World Cafe changed cultures from Greece to Mexico!

As an exhibit developer and museum educator I am often perplexed and surprised by what makes an exhibit so enticing to our young visitors. After creating exhibits for over 20 years, I have learned that using familiar components and every day objects, in this case items found in a kitchen or restaurant, offers children the opportunity to role play in a setting where they know what is expected of them. Children are often more open to learning about a new topics when they can draw upon prior knowledge and familiar topics to do so.

With the change of a new culture this year, brought new additions to the space. An interactive “Innovation Station” sharing board which offers visitors an opportunity to share recipes and traditions from their cultures with other museum visitors. The sharing board has recipes to take and enjoy making at home, and also invites families to leave their own favorite traditions for others to try.

So far, we have had visitors leave several family favorite recipes including “The Best Guacamole” and “Quiche in a Cup” that we will begin adding to our website for visitors to download and make at home.

The Kid’s World Café exhibit encourages children to use their imagination while interacting with other children and adults in that space. Learning and sharing information together is a winning combination and one we encourage throughout the museum. It is our hope that by experiencing and learning about other cultures, children will have a better understanding and appreciation of different cultures around the world.

You can’t go past the Kid’s World Cafe without hearing “Would you like extra cheese with your taco?” or even hearing specific words from the Mexican menu like “Guacamole” “Agua” or “Burritos”.  The museum’s exhibit team plans on changing cultures in the Café every few years so be on the look out to experience a new culture in the coming years. Until then … Bienvenidos a Cafeteria de Ninos!

Care to share?

If you’d like to download our young friend Kimberly’s recipe for Tostadas (she’s the girl shown here making tortillas with her abuela from Mexico), click here. And if you have a Mexican recipe that your family enjoys, please feel free to share it here in the Comments section! We are always looking for new recipes to share with our members and friends.

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