MUSEUM & CULTURE
Great Explorations Children's Museum
Pinellas County · Gulf Coast
A hands-on children's museum in St. Petersburg, running since 1986 and now sitting next door to Sunken Gardens.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
The Junior League of St. Petersburg founded the museum with Hands-On, Inc. in 1986, in a warehouse downtown. It moved to 1925 4th Street North, directly beside Sunken Gardens, which means a family can do a garden and a children's museum in one stop and one parking space. Everything inside is meant to be touched. The exhibits are built around doing rather than reading, with role-play areas, building and construction stations, water play, an art studio and climbing structures. The most remembered piece from the old building was the Touch Tunnel, ninety feet of completely blacked-out crawlway navigated by feel alone. The Early Learning Institute runs programs for children aged two to five, and the museum as a whole works for roughly that age up to about ten. It is a nonprofit rather than a commercial attraction, and the scale is modest, which is part of why it works for small children
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