By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Grandson Sky is an energetic four-year-old. With only a little coaxing he will clean up whatever room he left looking like it was subjected to a hurricane. But I’m not certain that he is ready to absorb the lesson at the downtown Children’s Museum that the world is running out of space for trash, and that it’s a mitzvah (our word, not theirs) to either recycle or re-purpose trash.
Pre-conditioning him and other pre-schoolers to think globally and act locally can’t do any harm, and the museum did get his creative juices flowing. Of the various places where he could take a seat and be creative — utilizing clay, paper and marker, paper and paste, wood blocks, or pottery and glow-in-the-dark shellac, the latter was his favorite.
At this station, recycling artist Jason Rogenes distributed shards that had been plastered over (thereby eliminating sharp edges), and invited Sky and other preschoolers to turn the objects any which way and to imagine them as something else. Robots, transformers, snowmen, monsters, and masks soon made their appearance. Rogenes drilled holes in these creations at the children’s request so they could be threaded and tied (and perhaps hung as ornaments on Christmas trees). He invited the children to put the glow-in-the-dark shellac over their objects of art. Sky just loved that part, giving his abstract creation three, or perhaps, four coats so it would glow like crazy.
While arts and crafts were a principal learning experience in this “touch everything” museum, there were some more active recreational activities as well. One room, for example, was filled with pillows made from feed bags — perfect for pillow fighting or a game of catch. There was a staircase made of old tires by which children could reach the slide. Various objects stuck into another wall transformed it into a climbing station. Numerous exhibits were made from objects that had been re-purposed.
In the several hours that we visited the Children’s Museum, Sky rushed from exhibit to exhibit while grandpa lumbered behind him. In the Rain House, which simulated the sound of rain on the rooftop, youngsters could pull up foam animals from the floor mats, and then try to figure from their shapes where to replace them. This exhibit, which parents monitor through paneless windows, requires children to take their shoes off before going inside.
After a chocolate chip cookie snack (Famous Amos), and a return visit to a few favorite exhibits, Sky was ready to take his clay, plaster and other creations home with him. As we were about to leave, he noted a Rube Goldberg pneumatic device that could suck a piece of paper up to a tube fixed to a high beam, then across the room, and then in an a-maze-ing pattern, down a wall and into a collection jar, triggering little lights and sounds as it progressed through the course, again made from repurposed objects.
Now this is an invention that would make any fundraiser envious, because not any piece of paper will do, just those rectangular green ones bearing the portraits of George Washington, or Abraham LIncoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant or Benjamin Franklin. Oh, yes, they’d take those with the picture of Thomas Jefferson too, but so few of those are around.
Once you put in one piece of currency, and watch its amazing progress into the collection basket, it’s just a given that –especially if you have a four-year-old with you– you have to do it “again,” and maybe “again” again. Oh what the Jewish Federation could do with a machine like that!
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com