For Immediate Release Contact: Nancy O'Shea 312.665.7103 or media@fieldmuseum.org THE CROWN FAMILY PLAYLAB A Parents’ Preview The Crown Family PlayLab offers six rich environments, each one filled with hands-on activities designed to stimulate young children’s curiosity and engage them in problem-solving and creative activities. They include elements to encourage parents and caregivers to take an active role their child’s discoveries and several padded areas where infants can play. Facilitators and docents are always on hand for guidance and additional resources. An Illinois Woodland A Northern Illinois woodland becomes a stage for dramatic animal play! Children (and their adult caregivers) can put on costumes and become a coyote or a cardinal, a frog or a squirrel, a butterfly or a bat…then star in their own nature play, right in the middle of a real museum diorama. The ambient sounds and lighting of night and day alternately fill the room, and with a push of a button, kids can light up specific animals mounted in the diorama and hear their calls. There’s a log tunnel to crawl through, a tree to peek into (look for the bats!)—even a place for an audience to watch the play. The Pueblo Children who enjoy playing house at home can now explore a way of life that’s both like and unlike their own. In a recreation of a 13th-century pueblo home and plaza, kids can discover the sources of the food they eat: they’ll see corn “growing” along with beans and squash, and they can gather it from the field, stack it for storage, pretend to cook it, or grind it with a mano and metate. They can make a coil pot from sand-filled fabric rolls, much like the ancient pueblo people did with clay, or let their creativity take them in new directions. In this area youngsters can also explore the home environments of two very different cultures, the Saharan Tuareg and North American Pawnee peoples. Boys as well as girls will enjoy playing with the large, tabletop models of a Tuareg tent and a Pawnee earth lodge, complete with furniture, people, and animals. Both are modeled on the full-size replicas that are long-time favorites at The Field Museum. The Scientists’ Lab Trilobite fossils. A shark’s tooth. Colorful embroidered textiles. Feathers and fur. The walls, tables, and drawers of the Science Lab are filled with real artifacts and specimens from the museum’s four major disciplines: anthropology, zoology, botany, and geology. In the Science Lab, kids can touch these items and do what real scientists do: look closely, measure, compare, sort…and most important, ask lots of questions. For toddlers there are tilt-out peek-a-boo drawers filled with surprising objects to discover on their own, or to play “Can you find…?” with a parent. Youngsters can explore a world of Plexiglas-encased specimens, from twigs and tadpoles to seed pods and snake skins, and sort them by shape, color, or their own unique logic. At the Magnification Table they’ll examine small objects more closely, moving them under magnifying lenses and seeing the images projected onto a large a video screen. At four Lab Tables, junior scientists can measure, identify, and interact directly with a variety of specimens from all four disciplines, including animal skulls and shells, pressed plants and bark, local fossils and crystals, masks and utensils from different cultures, and much more. Pull-out activity guides help to deepen the experience, and labels raise larger questions to ponder, such as “What did these animals do for a living?” or “What do these objects tell you about the people who used them?” Continue>>