Highlights for Kids at the Smithsonian Museums

Do your kids know where the cookies go when Cookie Monster eats them? Make the Smithsonian Museums a stop on your family’s travels to Washington, D.C., and your kids can meet the Muppets to learn their secrets.

Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog and all the other friends from Sesame Street live in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum, along with other icons such as Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz.

Elsewhere in this vast collection of Americana, older kids will like the colorful Entertainment Nation exhibit focusing on America’s role in pop culture, including theater, music, sports, movies and television. Take car-crazy teens to America on the Move for the first automobile driven across the United States, and a 40-foot stretch of Route 66. For hands-on activities, Spark!Lab is a space for children to create, explore, test, experiment and invent in changing themes related to the collections.

The adjacent National Museum of Natural History is possibly the most fascinating for children, with its vast dinosaur and fossil exhibits, Egyptian mummies, Insect Zoo (where they can climb through a termite hill), and glittering gemstones. Hands-on exhibits abound, including one where they can morph their face into a Neanderthal. In the interactive Q?rius and Q?rius Jr. rooms, they can look inside the museum’s workings and examine artifacts through microscopes and touchscreen activities.

Across the Mall at Air and Space Museum, kids can discover landmarks in the history of manned flight, with exhibits on early aviation pioneers and historic aircraft, including the 1903 Wright Flyer, Lindburgh’s solo trans-Atlantic Spirit of St. Louis and Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega 5B. More modern flight is represented by the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia and the spacesuit worn by the first human to walk on the Moon.