Crown Family PlayLab

  The Field Museum’s Crown Family PlayLab is an immersive environment created especially for children 2 to 6, with activities adaptable for children up to age 10. It starts with a child’s innate curiosity and a family-friendly setting, adds real artifacts and specimens, and encourages young explorers to connect with a rich and diverse world. The Crown Family PlayLab is definitely not your grandfather’s “museum piece”. It provides endless opportunities for young visitors to express themselves, make their own discoveries, develop new skills, and take on the role of scientist for a day. It’s a place for adults to rediscover their own sense of wonder, too.

            Everything in this 7,500-square-foot space is designed to be touched, picked up, sorted, moved around, climbed on, worn, or used in ways not yet imagined. It’s also designed with the environment in mind, using reclaimed and recycled materials wherever possible.

            With a huge variety of open-ended activities, the Crown Family PlayLab offers challenges that grow along with a child’s interests. For example, even little ones who aren’t walking yet love to discover hidden objects, crawl through a log, sit in a dinosaur’s nest, or bang on an African drum. Toddlers can enjoy playing house in a pueblo, comparing their footprints to a dinosaur’s, clapping and dancing to new rhythms, and sorting fascinating objects by shapes and colors. Preschool and older kids can dress up as an animal and star in their own nature play, or listen and learn to play a Latin beat.  They can examine butterfly wings and insects in amber, make fossil rubbings, dig a dinosaur bone out of a field jacket (just like Field Museum paleontologists), and develop their own creative projects in the art studio. All areas are accessible to wheelchairs, and the interactive elements accommodate children with a variety of physical disabilities.

            The Crown Family PlayLab is a great place for kids to beat the heat in summer and loose the cabin fever of winter. It’s also the perfect place for children and their caregivers to engage with science and learn through play.

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The Crown Family PlayLab is generously sponsored by the Crown family.