Child's play - Kids delight in exhibits celebrating life

CHERRY HILL, N.J. -- So the name needed work.

"Right In Your Own Backyard" just didn't roll off the tongue, no matter how fitting it was for a New Jersey children's museum celebrating diners, the boardwalk and road construction.

By the time the museum opened, the unwieldy name was gone. But the concept behind it never changed.

"It's this idea that all these amazing things are going on all around you, right in your own backyard," says Sarah Orleans, co-founder of the Garden State Discovery Museum.

For youngsters, a trip to the museum is just like real life acted out on a 24,000-square-foot stage.

From an indoor treehouse, kids search for wooden cutouts of the 22 birds they're most likely to see outside: a crow, an owl, a hawk. A pair of 5-year-olds shrieked with delight when they spotted a vulture.

"That's a turkey," declared Robbie DePersia of Cherry Hill.

Erik Bobo, of Mount Laurel, disagreed: "It's not a turkey." "You mean the chicken?" Robbie asked.

Erik shook his head, exasperated: "Chickens don't fly!" A replica farm stand trades exclusively in produce grown in the Garden State, including apples, peaches, cranberries, cantaloupe and watermelon.

"If you drive around some of the backroads in New Jersey in the fall, you can get all your produce," said Roree Iris-Williams, who left The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia with Orleans to start the museum.

In another display, wooden trees reveal secrets of the 1.1 million-acre Pinelands National Preserve.

Stick a hand into one knot hole to see what a raccoon's coarse fur feels like.

Reach into another and touch -- nothing. Someone made off with the gray fox and white-tailed deer.

"We'll probably find them somewhere else in the museum tonight," Iris-Williams said. "There's a lot of cleanup in a children's museum." At least the mural setting the scene remained unspoiled. It's based on a real cedar swamp inside the Pinelands.

Painters used a similar technique for the mural inside the "Under Construction" exhibit, which was modeled on photos of an authentic New Jersey road construction site.

"It wasn't too hard to find," Orleans said.

An anchor exhibit

At the end of the day, kids can spin on a barstool at a diner much like the 625 scattered throughout New Jersey. A laminated menu offers a chicken special and an all-American hamburger with cheese.

"It's one of the anchor exhibits that we knew we had to have when we opened," Iris-Williams said.

"Sarah and I grew up going to New Jersey diners." The New Jersey natives trace many of their ideas back to a trip to the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, listed by Child magazine as the best in the nation. After exploring the museum, they went to a restaurant and sketched their own floorplan on a placemat.

"We visited there and said, 'OK, that's what we want to be when we grow up," Orleans said.

Most of their ideas went straight from the placemat to the museum itself. Attendance has grown to about 150,000 a year, even as the 15 permanent exhibits have stayed much the same.

One other thing doesn't seem to change: Kids never lose their fascination with everyday life. To them, diners can be as interesting as dinosaurs, and the Jersey shore has much the same appeal as outer space.

"Kids are always in the present," Orleans said. "Kids don't have to be reminded to be there, to give themselves over to the experience." The museum's creators hope to teach children more about the state, and hopefully instill a sense of pride in it.

"We've all heard the jokes about New Jersey," Iris-Williams said. "This is really New Jersey. You can be proud of it, and you can have fun with it."