Brooklyn Children's Museum

Overview

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum in New York City opened in 1899 as the first children’s museum in the United States and is often called the world's oldest. Its collection holds almost 30,000 natural history and cultural objects, including more than 2,000 dolls from around the world, musical instruments, masks, shells, insects, and a complete Asian elephant skeleton. The museum uses these objects in its exhibits and programs so children can see real things up close. Today, a group of teens there is trained to find objects in the community and add them to the collection. It sits in Brooklyn's Crown Heights neighborhood, so many nearby families see it as part of everyday life.

Why It Matters

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum showed that museums can be built for children, not just adults. The museum says it is one of only four children’s museums in the United States that hold an educational collection of real objects. Its collection shows that real objects, like dolls, masks, and shells, can teach about cultures and nature in ways children connect with. Curators and educators there make the same choices every museum makes about which objects to show and how to explain them, but with young visitors in mind. For anyone considering a future as a curator, it is a reminder that a first museum visit can spark a career idea.