A top museum changed how I see creative messes

I sighed as I looked around our homeschool room. Play-Doh, stickers, tape, glue, markers, crayons, and other craft supplies littered every visible surface. My kids had played hard and made all kinds of artistic creations, and now that it was time for all of us to clean up the space, I was daunted at the task before us. 

I thought back to a revelation I had when I visited a leading children’s science museum last spring, a revelation that changed how I look at these kinds of creative messes in my home and helped me realize that they’re worth it. I hope it might help you see your home a little differently too.

Located in San Francisco, California, the Exploratorium is a groundbreaking science museum that describes itself as a “public learning laboratory exploring the world through science, art, and human perception.” I visited this awe-inspiring space on a trip to California with my 10-year-old last spring. 

We greatly enjoyed our time at this museum, and while there, I learned that the museum is a research and development laboratory that experiments with ideas. 

What does this mean? Well, the museum staff constantly tries out new exhibit spaces and observes how visitors interact with them. Then science museums around the world copy them: More than 400 museums in 43 countries use exhibit ideas developed at the Exploratorium.

As a homeschool mom and educator, I was intrigued to know the results of all this testing. How did probably the world’s best science museum encourage experimentation and innovation in kids?

I got my answer when we walked into the museum’s Tinkering Studio, a space for children and guests to explore building and creativity, and gasped in surprise. 

“Mom! It looks like our homeschool room!” my 10-year-old laughed. Sure enough, every surface was covered with stacks of cardboard boxes and recyclables, joined together by every art supply imaginable. 

I don’t think I’ve ever been more validated as a parent than in that moment, when I realized that all those creative messes I allow serve a vital purpose. The best science museum’s carefully researched method for encouraging exploration and experimentation was to do exactly what I’d been doing: letting the kids loose with creative supplies and materials.

Seeing the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio made me realize I was doing something right… even though at the same time, I’m very glad we can close the door on the homeschool room and not look at all that creativity when we don’t want to.

Of course, just as important as being creative is learning to pick up after yourself and restore a space to the way it was when you found it. I do require my kids to help clean up their messes and put away their supplies, but these periods of tidiness are short-lived. Instead, just about every day, you can find some kind of building or art project going on in our schoolroom.

If this sounds familiar to you, and you too have little inventors who love to build forts out of your furniture and fill your shelves with their elaborate creations, I hope what I saw at the Exploratorium encourages you as it did me. 

The creative messes can feel overwhelming. At the same time, I try to remember that giving my kids space to build and tinker helps them learn so much more than I can ever teach them.

So to all the parents with marker streaks on their tables and cardboard-box constructions on their floors, I’m raising a glass to you, as you do the hard but important work of letting your kids be creative. 

Keep letting them enter deeply into the artistic and constructive work that engages them, knowing it’s one of the best things you can do to nurture their incredible and awe-inspiring creativity.

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