Yes, it includes family favorites like plenty of dinosaur bones (including a baby T. rex!!!) and dioramas displaying preserved animals. Beyond the slam-dunks, though, is a museum curated and crafted with every age in mind. Families will find hands-on activities to bring natural history to life, interactive displays, friendly museum staff and outdoor spaces that incorporate nature into the learning experience.

LA’s Natural History Museum with kids

My kids weren’t with me on this trip, but now I want to plan a trip to California  just so we can visit LA’s Natural History Museum with my kids. You guys, I just can’t stop raving about this kid-friendly museum, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Here are the highlights for when you visit LA’s Natural History Museum with kids.

Dinosaurs: The star attractions

Dinos are the A-list celebrities of the Natural History Museum, and for good reason: It is absolutely awe-inspiring to stand beneath the fossilized skeletons of these behemoths.

You’ll see two right off the bat in the central foyer of LA’s Natural History Museum. Here, curators recreated a fight between a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Triceratops. (Who do you think would have won? Definitely not me—that T. rex is about to nom my head!)

Continue on to the Dinosaur Hall and you’ll see two rooms on two floors—after all, these dinosaurs are so big they need the room.

Level 10 travel tip: Look for the wall of fossilized bones—it has a touch screen display in front of it where kids can “filter” the pictures (e.g. by meat-eaters or species). You can play I Spy or a scavenger hunt: Let your kids challenge you to find a predator’s tooth or vertebrae!

Make sure to scope out the area where you can watch scientists working on actual fossils. When I visited, one was using a tiny drill to clean a 24.8 million year old bone from an Ichthyosaur. Watching these experts at work is even better than career day at your kids’ school!

Animals here and animals gone: Halls of diversity

LA’s Natural History Museum has several enormous rooms filled with scenes depicting animal life in the wild. Your family will see preserved animals that live among us today (for example the hawks in the Bird Room) and those that are, sadly, extinct.

Your kids may recognize some of the animals from the zoo, but chances are they’ve never seen them this close. Of course the animals at this kid-friendly museum aren’t alive, but your kids will notice details—how feathers lay flat on top of one another, the unique patterns on an antelope’s stripes—they’d never spot from afar.

Level 10 travel tip: Read the informational displays at every animal to yourself: Many of them have remarkable trivia about the animals depicted. (Did you know, for example, that the ostrich has the largest eyes of any land animal, and that a group of hippos is called a bloat? Neither did I, until I visited the Natural History Museum!)

Even more exhibits!

If I’m honest, to me, everything besides dinosaur bones is secondary in a natural history museum. But LA’s Natural History Museum made me rethink my dino-focused zeal.

The reason for my epiphany? The Gem and Mineral Hall.

I never thought this section of LA’s Natural History Museum would be so fascinating, but I marveled at the colors, textures and shapes of minerals found deep underground and inside rocks. And the bling contained inside the gems room made my eyes pop (and the security guard keep his eyes on everyone inside).

In addition, you’ll find permanent exhibits on shells, ancient Latin American art and fetish carvings.

Make sure to look for rotating exhibits, too. When I visited the Natural History Museum, they hosted an exhibit on tattoos throughout time (though entry costs an additional $8, unless you’re a member).

Exploring actual nature at LA’s Natural History Museum with kids

LA’s Natural History Museum is the only one of its kind that does a remarkable job incorporating, well, the outside natural world (at least that I’ve ever seen).

Step outside the museum and you’ll find a half-dozen different habitats and many more opportunities to learn. Keep an eye out for LA’s wildlife that visits the museum not to stare goggle-eyed at dinosaur bones but to take a bath in the pond, sip nectar from blooms or nest in a tree.

Level 10 travel tip: Bring a change of clothes for your kids. On a hot day, your kids will want to splash and play in the water feature. They’ll be amazed that they can splash around at a museum!

Visiting LA’s Natural History Museum with kids

LA’s Natural History Museum has kid-friendly activities and features throughout the museum. They do an exceptional job getting kids interested—and excited!—about science and the natural world. If you’re visiting the Natural History Museum with kids, don’t miss these highlights.

Nature walks

Every day at 3:30, Natural History Museum staff lead a group of kids throughout the outdoor section of the museum. Kids might have a chance to spot finches or mourning doves on the bird viewing platform, harvest snap peas from the edible garden or look for wildlife in the pond. The museum’s nature walks are free with admission.

Critter Club

This monthly meet-up introduces kids 3 to 5 years old to different kinds of animals through art, song, stories and other hands-on activities throughout the museum. The sessions are on a break now but will begin again in Summer 2018.

The Discovery Center: Hands-on central

In the Natural History Museum’s Insect Zoo and Discovery Center, kids can play and explore to their hearts’ content. They can dig for casts of dinosaur bones, pretend to camp out and peek across the museum grounds in a spyglass.

Then get close and personal with creepy crawlies. You’ll find cockroaches, pill bugs, gigantic spiders, millipedes and more in the habitats at the center of the room.

“Ask me” buttons

If your kids are anything like mine, they don’t have the patience to read (or listen to) many of the plaques that explain the displays. But when given the chance to learn from a real-live expert, they’ll surprise you at how much information they soak in. The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles offers plenty of opportunities for kids to express their curiosity and get details from experts. 

Level 10 travel tip: Challenge your kids to find a staff member with a yellow “Ask me” button—it’ll be like a scavenger hunt. Then listen to your kids’ questions. They’re so open-minded that they ask about things you’d never consider. (“Do baby Triceratops have teeth?”)

Find the rats

Rats—in a museum?! You bet, if it’s the LA Natural History Museum! Downstairs on the ground level families will find an interactive Nature Lab, where kids are invited to ask questions about how humans interact with the natural world. Part of our coexistence with animals and plants is living alongside rats.

There is a structure with see-through walls where kids can try to spot rats scurrying here and there—and even overhead!

The nitty gritty: Visiting LA’s Natural History Museum with kids

Here are the details you need when planning a visit to LA’s Natural History Museum.

• Admission is $15 for adults, $12 for youth 13-17, $7 for children 3-12 and free for kids under 3. If you go more than twice a the year, it’s actually more economical to buy a membership.

Level 10 travel tip: If you do buy a membership, make sure to use it to get free admission at the La Brea Tar Pits and The William S Hart Museum (which has a herd of bison on the property!). They have reciprocal memberships, which means even more natural history fun!

• Family restrooms and nursing rooms are located throughout the museum.
• A cafe offers kid-friendly food downstairs. There’s plentiful seating outdoors and, if it’s raining (or too blazing hot), in a solarium. You can also bring your own food for a picnic.
• This kid-friendly museum is right next to the Exposition Park Rose Garden and is a short walk from several aircraft on display outdoors. If your kids are antsy after being relatively quiet and contained in the museum, let them run their yayas out in the Rose Garden or challenge them to find the planes.

I can’t wait to return to LA’s Natural History museum with my kids. If you’re looking for kid-friendly activities in LA, make sure to put this museum on your itinerary!

And if you’re looking for even more ideas, check out my friend Melissa’s guide to fun things to do with kids in LA over on her Thrifty Family Travels blog.

What is your favorite part of visiting a natural history museum?

The post LA’s Natural History Museum with kids: Learn, explore + play (seriously!)  appeared first on To & Fro Fam.

We look at it every day, so when we planned to visit Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History with kids, my little dinosaur lovers were beyond excited.

Despite my own fascination with dinosaurs and fossils, I’d never been to the Burke Museum in Seattle. Heck, I’ve been to Seattle dozens of times, but I’d never even heard of the Burke Museum until I started researching kid-friendly things to do in Seattle.

Most people haven’t, either—but that makes this gem much less crowded than other family-friendly spots in Seattle.

So when I came across this natural history museum that had a dinosaur exhibit in Seattle, I put it on our list of activities. (I don’t plan an itinerary or set anything in stone when doing family vacations—I prefer to allow for lots of flexibility, which means less disappointment in the end.)

And we definitely weren’t disappointed. We were all excited to see dinosaur bones—and we ended up getting even more than we hoped for.

Exploring the Dinosaur Museum, Seattle

Complete skeletons of prehistoric animals populate the Seattle dinosaur exhibit that you’ll first see at the Burke Museum of Natural History’s entrance. I was especially partial to the fossils of the mammoth, with its enormous tusks.

Can you imagine meeting one of those in the wild?! Clearly, the girls were excited to see this big guy, too!

Why the Burke Museum is a great place for kids

There are plenty of fossils and dinosaur skeletons in Burke Museum of Natural History and it’s no wonder people often refer to it as the Seattle dinosaur museum! Kids have a great time looking at them and it makes for a fun outing in the city.

What’s more, hands-on activities—like feeling a cast of a dinosaur’s footprint—help little ones engage with natural history.

I love that the Burke Museum also addresses the science behind evolution in a kid-friendly way. One entire wall is covered in a tree of evolution that shows how different animals share a common ancestor. And right after that display, a dinosaur skeleton that looks remarkably like a bird hints at the connection to modern-day avians.

In addition to the main dinosaur exhibit, you can see scientists working on several projects—including uncovering a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull.

Admittedly, I was more interested in watching them work than my kids were (“Look, girls, a real-live paleontologist!!!” #fangirl), but it did give them a chance to see how the fossils get to look museum-perfect.

More than fossils at the Seattle Natural History Museum

The entire bottom floor of the Burke Museum of Natural History is dedicated to Native American artifacts and other cultures. The section featured textiles, masks, carvings, and other beautiful relics from Pacific Northwest Tribes.

I admired how the Burke Museum treated the sometimes dubious history of how collectors got some of the artifacts.

One carving, for example, had been stolen from the roof of a Native American building a century ago. The Burke Museum reached an agreement with the tribe to keep the carving for a short time longer before it will return it.

While we were at the Burke Museum, they also featured an exhibit of home shrines from around the world.

Visiting Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History for kids: What you need to know

• The Burke Museum of Natural History is housed on the northwest corner of the University of Washington campus.
• Entrance fee for kids under 5 is free; older children and adults have a $22 entry fee.
• Coat check is free. Wahoo!
• Parking can be tight around the University of Washington. Instead of driving around, you can pay for your parking at the UW kiosk at the university entrance; they’ll tell you where you can find an open space.
• In the main dinosaur exhibit, there’s a section in the back with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs for kids to play with. It’s a great opportunity for little ones to do what they do best: play!
• Kids will need 1-2 hours to explore the dinosaur museum. You can see all the exhibits in that time.

So if you’re looking for things to do in Seattle with kids—especially if your children love dinosaurs—the Burke Museum is an easy win, free of crowds and an inexpensive but memorable visit. Enjoy, and ROAR!

What do you do in Seattle with kids? What is your favorite family-friendly activity, destination or restaurant in Seattle?

The post A Dinosaur Lover’s Wonderland: Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History appeared first on To & Fro Fam.