Spurlock educators take a trip to Peoria Museums

• News tag

• Post Date: 04/25/2018
• Author: Kim Sheahan
• Reading Time: 2 minute read

The Museum’s Education staff is always enthusiastic about visiting with educators from other area museums, sharing information, and finding ways to collaborate. Recently, we took a field trip to Peoria’s PlayHouse Children’s Museum (external link) and Riverfront Museum (external link).

Opened in 2015, the PlayHouse gives young children the opportunity to experience different aspects of life in Peoria through interactive environments like farm life, construction, waterways, office buildings, and a movie theater. Also included are exploration areas like the sand porch, the SciLab, and Motion Commotion. There are special areas for the youngest visitors, where they can crawl around and investigate the world at their eye level. The PlayHouse staff members were generous with their time, giving us a tour of the public areas and answering our many questions about working in such a lively and hands-on space.

The morning was filled with a lot of oohing and ahhing at all of the imaginative activities, and we also had conversations that reflected trends and topics of concern to all interpretive staff: How could the family kitchen area be reconfigured to represent more of Peoria’s diverse populations? How could each facility be used to its greatest advantage? How can our museums work together to create new, meaningful experiences for people across central Illinois?

The Riverfront Museum exhibits topics from art, history, and the natural world. In addition to permanent exhibits like the Illinois River Encounter and the Street (the story of Peoria, including oral histories and hands-on opportunities), display areas present a wide range of art and natural history objects in the Museum’s permanent collections. In addition, there is a planetarium and a giant screen theater.

Riverfront staff treated us to a sneak peek look at their newest exhibit, Celebrate Illinois: 200 Years in the Land of Lincoln (external link), which opened to the public later that evening. We were interested to learn that the Museum staff had encountered the same questions we had when putting together our Knowledge at Work exhibit about the history of the University of Illinois: How do you represent something this broad and complex in this limited space? What objects do you select to show? What topics might get left out? How do you augment local history exhibits with activities and programming?

Our thanks go out to everyone who made our visits so incredibly special. We’ll definitely be back to “play in Peoria!”