On Wednesday, May 23rd, I made my way down to the New Children’s Museum. I drove to a free parking lot and then took the MTS trolley the rest of the way. The NCM consists of three floors. The Community Gallery is located on the second floor. The Community Gallery is a space where you can share and make art together. The gallery showcases art by local artists, schools, and community groups. One of the walls in the exhibit showcases the three major changes for the Children’s Museum: the beginnings in La Jolla (1983-1993), the warehouse (1993-2002), and the commitment to arts (2002-2008). On another wall, they had the last ten years at the New Children’s Museum as a kind of collaborative timeline where you were able to write on a sticky note of an event that happened in your life and place it on their timeline. In the center of the room were three blank floor plans with building blocks all over the floor. The children were playing with them and creating buildings and houses with them on the floor plans. After visiting the Community Gallery, I decided to walk around the rest of the museum and see some of the other exhibits. Another exhibit that I really enjoyed was the interactive aquarium. The children received an outline of some kind of sea animal and then colored and designed it however they wanted. After that, they scanned it into a computer and it showed up in the “aquarium,” a big screen that covered the entire wall.
