COLUMBIA — Parents looking for something fun to do this summer can find two great children’s museums in Mississippi.
The Mississippi Children’s Museum in Jackson and the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center in Gulfport both pack in an amazing amount of things that kids love to do in unique buildings.
My daughters, 5 and 2, really enjoy visiting them. After we stopped by both in the past couple of weeks, I thought it would be worth sharing about two great places in our state that I haven’t read much about.
The Mississippi Children’s Museum, which opened in 2010, is just off the Lakeland Drive exit on I-55 in the area that also includes the state’s agriculture, sports and natural science museums.
There always seems to be a diverse group of visitors there with attentive parents and generally well-adjusted children. I suppose a museum draws a higher-brow audience than your typical state fair or sporting event, but it does give one some glimmer of hope for the future.
The design is really well-done; it’s essentially one huge room with multiple levels. You come in on the top floor, and the bulk of the exhibits are on a lower level. There’s even an underground area that has tunnels to crawl through and information about things like burrowing animals native to Mississippi and how oil wells are drilled.
Throughout the facility, there’s a great job of working in Mississippi themes in an authentic way that really shows an understanding of the state. That includes a small replica of the Windsor Ruins, the Mississippi River plantation mansion whose columns still stand after the home burned in 1890, lists of writers and their hometowns, and homages to major industries such as forestry and catfish farming.
The museum overlooks a municipal golf course, and although I get the occasional longing to hit the links when seeing groups playing through, it’s the ultimate compliment from an avid golfer like me to a museum that I’ve never actually seriously considered abandoning it for the course.
Meanwhile in Gulfport, the Lynn Meadows Discovery Center is located just across the street from the beach. It was rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina inside what was originally an elementary school constructed in 1915.
Like its counterpart in Jackson, the museum incorporates a vertical layout, but this time you come in on the bottom. In the center, there’s a “super colossal climbing structure” that goes all the way to the top. Children climb up platforms and can get off at each floor. I squeezed in behind my 2-year-old to make sure she could handle it, and although it’s tight quarters for an adult, it’s still fun to work your way up. And even kids as young as 2 can do it without much help at all. There’s also a spiral ramp that connects each level if you’re less adventurous (or flexible).
Some of my 5-year-old’s favorite spots included a vet clinic, set up to look like the real thing, including large, realistic stuffed pets, and a TV studio where they can see themselves on a set hosting shows. The 2-year-old liked a market, where she put play food in a basket and drove it around, and a science area where there’s a lot of things to grab and interact with.
The museum also has an art studio where they have a different project set up each visit that children can take home as a souvenir, which I prefer to a trinket from the gift shop.
Mississippi is fortunate to have people who have invested into building such facilities for young families in our state. The best way we can say thank you is to go and let our children use them.
• Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Contact him at (601) 736-2611 or csmith@columbianprogress.com.
