Press

The New York Times

How old would you expect your children to be before you took them to a museum for a first look at the “Mona Lisa”?

The answer may soon be as young as 2 or 3. And it will not require flying to Paris.

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan plans to feature a reproduction of the “Mona Lisa” — along with a cave painting, an Egyptian painting, a Jackson Pollock and other significant artworks — on a wall in “PlayWorks,” its new 4,000-square-foot permanent exhibition for children under 5. But this will be far from a dry art history tutorial for toddlers.

Beneath each image will be a second canvas, a textural and three-dimensional rendering, which a child can touch. And this installation will be just one in a series of interactive exhibits: a huge transparent wall whose surface is for fingerpainting; a climbing structure with hidden dioramas; a sand laboratory with buried “treasures”; a construction area for building gadgets; and, among many other displays, a mechanical baby dragon that will say words when children drop letters into its mouth. The exhibition’s emphasis is not the old saw that learning is fun, but that fun is learning.

“The idea is that in moments of everyday play children are really getting a tremendous amount of education,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and an author of “Einstein Never Used Flashcards,” a book whose title sums up the exhibition’s philosophy. In a telephone interview Dr. Hirsh-Pasek, an adviser to the project, said that the significance of play as a foundation for learning was “a critically important cultural message.”

It is a message the museum intends to take far beyond Manhattan. The $3 million “PlayWorks,” to open Sept. 21 in the museum’s building at 212 West 83rd Street, represents the start of its National Family Play and Learning Initiative, a program spanning several years in which the museum hopes to provide models for similar exhibitions nationwide. In late 2007 it plans to open a satellite version of “PlayWorks” in the South Bronx, the first step toward establishing a children’s museum in that borough.

“The steps are that we open ‘PlayWorks’ here, and we study it,” said Andrew S. Ackerman, the executive director of the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, during a recent tour of the building’s third floor, which has been completely gutted for the project. “With an advisory group we’ll look at the different ways we can replicate it nationally. We may provide blueprints for a physical space, or just a curriculum if a community doesn’t want a physical space.”

The opportunity to study preschoolers is built into the exhibition, which includes a formal research laboratory. The lab, one of the first of its kind in the country, incorporates three cameras to record the activity of children and their parents. (All participating families will sign consent forms.) This fall Michael Cohen, a New York psychologist, will use the lab to inaugurate a series of national studies of how new forms of electronic media can benefit education.

Like much of the space, the laboratory has been established with government funds.“PlayWorks” has been entirely financed by federal, state and local grants, foundation grants and the private philanthropists Judith and John J. Hannan. “The exhibit itself will have no connection to any corporation,” Mr. Ackerman said.

The need for “PlayWorks,” he said, is underscored by research showing the importance of early learning in helping children get ready for school. One study has shown that by age 4 children reared in poverty have heard 32 million fewer spoken words than their peers with professional parents. “PlayWorks” is intended to help bridge that gap, and much of its design is based on the museum’s experiences in working with a Manhattan residence for homeless women and their children and in a free program it established last fall at a community organization in Mott Haven, in the Bronx.

That program has been successful, Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Bronx borough president, said in a telephone interview. Mr. Carrión, who approached the Manhattan museum with his own proposal for a Bronx children’s museum, sees “PlayWorks” as particularly important for children “not very advanced in their literacy.”

“What makes CMOM special as a model,” he said, using the museum’s acronym, pronounced SEE-mom, “is that if your literacy is not strong, you still understand what the exhibit is about.” “PlayWorks,” designed by Roto Studio, a firm in Dublin, Ohio, is devoted to fostering not only literacy, but also mathematical understanding and what Dr. Hirsh-Pasek calls “cultural literacy”: hence the “Mona Lisa.” And while the display is divided into spaces like an Exploratory Art and Science Area and a Practice Play Area (for infants), many elements will overlap.

Babies, for instance, will probably not paint on the transparent wall — which will be washed periodically when a museum staff member touches a switch, unleashing a ceiling-to-floor cascade of water — but they will be able to touch buttons that make colors appear on a screen. And while toddlers can place foam blocks of different shapes into a wall of geometric cutouts in the Constructive Play Area, children who are 3 or 4 can experiment with adding and subtracting groceries in the mock New York deli that is the part of the Imaginative Play Area, which also includes a model bus and a firetruck.

“We wanted the exhibition to show what’s extraordinary in the ordinary,” Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said. “Firetrucks and buses have patterns on them that can teach math.” Just pointing out that one ice cream cone has two scoops and that the other has one, she said, can be a far more effective route to discovering math than a flash card.

One element expected to be an enormous hit is the baby dragon, nicknamed Alphie (as in alphabet). Children can pluck small rectangles — they have a letter on one side and a word and a picture on the other — from a Letter Garden and “feed” them to the dragon. Inside Alphie is a sensor. After ingesting the D, for instance, the dragon, which has been given an androgynous, childlike voice, will say: “D is for dirt. Mmmmm, my favorite.” (It also spontaneously spouts chatter peppered with New Yorkisms, like “Fuggedaboudit.”)

All of this is intended to be welcoming to parents, particularly those who are not typical museumgoers.

“Parents from shelters feel very intimidated about teaching reading to their children: ‘Oh, I don’t like to,’ or ‘I don’t know how,’ ” said Leslie Bushara, the museum’s deputy director for education. “We wanted a place where looking at words and letters was fun and could build the foundation for sitting together and reading books.”

The exhibition will also have bilingual signs (in English and Spanish) and a place in the infant area where families can hear lullabies in different languages. The art wall of what Mr. Ackerman calls “iconic images” will include a painting like “The Banjo Lesson,” by Henry O. Tanner, which depicts African-Americans.

To make the experience more affordable, the museum is expanding a program in which it offers low-income families annual memberships for $5. (A family membership normally costs $145.) Another program provides free admission to families participating in Head Start.

If the exhibition is effective, it will give parents of all income levels ideas for playing creatively with their children. Of course, museum officials will know more once “PlayWorks” opens.

“We leave a part of the budget for remediation,” Mr. Ackerman said. “But there’s only one thing we can guarantee: However much we test and design, kids will find a different way to use things.”

By LAUREL GRAEBER