Tips for Navigating the Boston Museum of Science

Disclosure: I received complimentary tickets to the Boston Museum of Science to facilitate this post. Any opinions are my own.

The last time I toured the halls of the Boston Museum of Science was 10 years ago, when Derek and I were dating and decided to be spontaneous tourists. This summer I had the opportunity to take my almost 4-year-old to the Museum of Science for the first time. Almost all of the things I remember as a child or the spaces and places I thought he’d find interesting frequently didn’t even register on his radar.

When navigating the Boston Museum of Science, I realized that even though the concepts can be difficult for a 4-year-old to understand, there was plenty to entertain him, and at the end of the day, you just never know what will peak a child’s curiosity.

Here were some highlights and tips for exploring the Boston Science Museum with an almost 4-year-old.

-Get there early, and if you can go on an weekday. We arrived on a Monday at 9:30. We got parking on the same level of the entrance to the museum, spaces away from the door and for the first hour or so it felt like we had the entire museum to ourselves

– Keep your visit time limited and don’t try to see it all. We stayed for about 3-4 hours and for our first trip it was enough time for him to have some fun experiences before he was tired, hungry and at-risk for a melt-down. I got a great sense of what he liked and didn’t like, so I’ll know better what to prioritize on a return trip.

– The museum has a lot of audio stations that provide information, and he wouldn’t listen to them for a second. So we looked for a lot of hands-on experiences. He loved the exhibits like the Live Animal Care Center and  Science in the Park.  At Science in the Park, children can engage in activities like sitting on a see saw and riding in a swing. There’s a running track where children can race a strip of lights to the end. Gavin loved it, he ran it at least 10 times.

– Bring some hand sanitizer. We took Gavin to the Boston Children’s Museum when he was 18 months and the next day he had the vomiting flu. Museums, like this one have TONS of buttons to activate in each exhibit and toys for children to manipulate. There was hand sanitizer available in the museum, but I like to carry a smaller one in my purse. The next day when I asked Gavin about some of the favorite things we had seen together, he said he just “loved pushing all the buttons.”

-One of the best places in the museum for children Gavin’s age was the Discovery Center. It’s a completely enclosed, separate area of the museum that included  hands-on manipulatives and guide instructed activities.  He made a fingerprint and looked at it through a microscope, inspected dozens of large rocks with a magnifying glass and enjoyed experimenting with air.

– As part of our ticket we were provided with tickets to the Planetarium to see the Big Bird’s Adventure: One World One Sky. When visiting the museum, these tickets need to be purchased separately, ahead of time. The Planetarium is a round theater where you sit in a big, reclined chair, watching a show projected in a dome. This experience was perfect for Gavin’s age range. Big Bird and Elmo teach children about the sun, stars, moon and constellations. It was the right amount of time for his attention (40 minutes) and the information was completely presented at a level he could understand.

What’s your family’s museum to explore? Any tips you’d like to share when exploring the Boston Museum of Science?