Minnesota Children's Museum ~ Family Travel Review

Last weekend we took a road trip to Minnesota.  Bloomington, MN is an easy 4 hour drive from the Des Moines area and Saturday we spent most of the day enjoying all that the Mall of America has to offer.  On Sunday we took a short drive from our hotel in Bloomington to downtown St. Paul to visit the Minnesota Children's Museum.

We arrived very close to the 9am opening time and were able to find a spot to park on the street.  I think the museum may have been a little less busy at that early hour due to the fact that Daylight Savings Time had started so we lost an hour of sleep the night before.  It was nice time for the kids to explore.

They wanted to start in the "Our World" exhibit.  My daughter jumped in to drive a city bus right away and my son took off to go serve a meal at the Korean restaurant.  From there they shopped at the grocery store, delivered mail to the post office and around town and became rock stars.

 

My daughter had been very excited when we drove by the outside of the museum and she saw the big Dora & Diego poster.  I knew she would love the Dora & Diego exhibit.  This is a visiting exhibit at the Minnesota Children's Museum that will be there thru September 22, 2013.

At this exhibit the kids visited Isa's Flower Garden, the Pirate Piggies' Ship and Diego's Animal Rescue Center.  They really enjoyed the scanning the animals in the rescue center and helping them.

My son had really wanted to play in the World Works area before we'd gone upstairs for Dora, so that's where we headed next.  He could have spent all day working on the construction site using the crane and hauling blocks.  My daughter is in preschool this year and she was quite fond of the giant chalkboard and reading area.  She wanted to play school and was very happy hanging out there for a while.

I believe we had to drag them both away from their favorite areas because there was still more to see!  Our next stop was at the Secrets of Circles visiting exhibit.  There were so many hands on activities in this area sharing the history and use of circles in our world.  This exhibit will be the museum until May 12th.

My favorite activity in this area was the "spinning table".  There were tennis balls and discs to place on the table to see how they would move.  It was fun to see how each item would move and fascinating would you could get an item to spin around for a while.  Okay, maybe I'm easily entertained but I could have done that for much longer than we did, but of course we had to share the table!

Next we stopped in the Earth World exhibit where the kids were able to crawl through tunnels and pretend to be ants.  My daughter found a stream and had a great time playing with the frogs and tadpoles while my son moved some clouds around to create a thunderstorm over our environment.  While we were up there they had Turtle Time so they both wanted their turn to pet a real turtle.

During our visit they had some Celtic dancers performing so it was fun to take quick breaks from playing and watch the dance.  When it was time to go we told the kids they could choose one last area to go to.  They both wanted to go back to "Our World" so that's what we did.  It was considerably more crowded at this time, but they were happy doing what the loved.  My son was taking orders from strangers at the restaurant and my daughter delivered some more mail.  Their last 10 minutes easily turned into 20 as they were in no hurry whatsoever to leave.

We were able to spend over 3 hours at the museum and saw a lot of it, but sadly we did have to hit the road to grab some lunch before our drive home in winter weather.  We had a another great visit and it will continue to be one of our favorite things to do in Minnesota.


Disclosure:  Thanks to the Minnesota Children's Museum for sponsoring this post.  All opinions are 100% mine.