If your kids (and you) have loved Eric Carle's books, you can become part of them at the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia at a new exhibit that lets the little ones run through giant blades of grass, dance with fireflies as their shadows comes to life on the big screen, and try on butterfly wings.
The Very Eric Carle: A very Hungry, Quiet, Lonely, Clumsy, Busy exhibit, which opened Saturday and runs through Jan. 12, incorporates themes from many of Carle's most popular works, as the name suggests.
Little ones can wander through the rooms slapping at lights or noisemakers and fluttering like an insect or sitting quietly building a kaleidoscope butterfly or drawing at a craft table. Like everything else at the Please Touch Museum, the exhibit is scaled to their size and designed to engage their eyes, hands, ears and minds.
This exhibit is the first in a partnership between Please Touch and Main Line Health and Nemours Children's Health System. As part of the exhibit launch on Saturday, they announced that any family that has a new baby at a Main Line Health hospital between now and the end of May will get a free three-month, famlly-of-four membership to the Please Touch Museum. There will also be special story times for pediatric patients at Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital, which include a visit from Please Touch's mascot, Squiggles.
Dozens of parents and kids tried out the new Carle exhibit Saturday following the ribbon cutting. The interactive aspects range from trying on butterfly wings or popping your head through a page from a book to high tech interactions where kids stand in front of a projector that translates their movements into shadows that interact with fireflies on a giant screen.
There is also space for quiet time, like coloring, moving colored shapes to decorate a giant butterfly's wings and, of course, reading Eric Carle books.
