6 Children’s Museum to Visit in the South

Throughout the south, children’s museums offer an endless variety of experiences and innovative exhibits to excite children about the world around them. While providing hours of fun for all family travelers, children’s museums teach new skills with adventures in science, nature, technology, the arts and world cultures.

The Children’s Museum of the Upstate in Greenville, South Carolina, is targeted for children under 12, who can turn drawings into moving images using a zoetrope or make all the noise they want on some unusual musical instruments. A wheelchair-accessible outdoor play area is a place for active play, with a tire fort, merry-go-round and slides.

At Glazer Children’s Museum of Tampa, kids can express themselves through dance, music and color, getting creative on the dance floor, building with colorful blocks and tiles, and interacting with a musical wall mural. At the St Joseph’s Hospital exhibit, they can watch their skeleton move along with them on Skelevision or give an Unmonster a CT scan.

In Charlotte, North Carolina, Discovery Place Science is home to the region’s largest IMAX Dome Theater. Through Sept. 8, kids can meet Giganotosuarus and other unfamiliar dinosaurs that evolved in South America, Africa and Madagascar. Another recreation on display is the Suchomimus from the Sahara Desert in Niger, a giant, 33-foot-long creature that weighed more than 6,600 pounds.

Greensboro Children’s Museum, also in North Carolina, is filled with interactive areas that include a construction house, post office, grocery store, medical clinic and learning garden. Outside, the Outdoor Play Plaza taps into a child’s creative problem solving with two 30-foot-tall Neptune XXL Climbers connected by a 25-foot suspended net tunnel.

A pottery studio at The Interactive Neighborhood for Kids in Gainsville, Georgia, inspires kids to be creative and perhaps begin a lifetime hobby. The star of the GrandPappy Airlines exhibit is a full-sized 1955 Aero Commander 560 aircraft, letting kids explore the inner workings of a real airplane. They can recreate the experience of going to an airport, checking in for a flight and getting onto the plane.

Local Alabama culture is at the heart of many exhibits at Children’s Hands-on Museum of Tuscaloosa, where kids learn about river transportation in Alabama from the wheelhouse of a towboat. As captain of Tim Parker, they navigate Black Warrior River using the turning sticks, a compass and five views of their course. At a replica of a Choctaw Village from the 1700s, kids learn to read a pictographic map and speak a few phrases of the Choctaw language.