For Immediate Release Contact: Nancy O'Shea 312.665.7103 or media@fieldmuseum.org Dig in…Dress up…Explore and Grow! There’s a Play Date Every Day at the CROWN FAMILY PLAYLAB Opens Friday, September 14, 2007 The curiosity of a child is boundless! Preschoolers, toddlers, even infants are natural scientists. They’re constantly observing and testing the world around them, finding unexpected pleasure and excitement in things most adults take for granted. Now there’s a wonderful new hands-on learning center that encourages those explorations and lets you share in your child’s creative play: the Crown Family PlayLab at The Field Museum. The PlayLab is an immersive environment created especially for children 2 to 6, with activities adaptable for children up to age 10. It starts with a child’s innate curiosity and a family-friendly setting, adds real artifacts and specimens, and encourages young explorers to connect with a rich and diverse world. The PlayLab is definitely not your grandfather’s “museum piece”; it provides endless opportunities for young visitors to express themselves, thrill to their own discoveries, develop new skills, and take on the role of scientist for a day. It’s a place to rediscover your own sense of wonder, too, as you join your child in new adventures. The Crown Family PlayLab is generously sponsored by the Crown Family. Designed from a Child’s Point of View While adults come to a museum primarily to look at things, children are all hands-on—and we’ve designed the PlayLab with that in mind. Everything in this 7,500-square-foot space is designed to be touched, picked up, sorted, moved around, climbed on, worn, or used in ways we grown-ups probably haven’t even thought of yet. The PlayLab is a place where young children make tangible connections with nature and with different cultures, learn about themselves and their world…and have a blast! It’s also designed with the environment in mind, using reclaimed and recycled materials wherever possible. With a huge variety of open-ended activities, the PlayLab offers challenges that grow along with your child’s interests, and new adventures every time you visit. For example, even little ones who aren’t walking yet love to discover hidden objects, crawl through a log, sit in a dinosaur’s nest, or bang on an African drum. Toddlers will enjoy playing house in a pueblo, comparing their footprints to a dinosaur’s, clapping and dancing to new rhythms, and sorting fascinating objects by shapes and colors. Preschool and older kids can dress up as an animal and star in their own nature play, or listen and learn to play a Latin beat. They can examine butterfly wings and insects in amber, make fossil rubbings, dig a dinosaur bone out of a field jacket (just like our paleontologists do!), and develop their own creative projects in the art studio. And that’s just the start. Continue>>