Kids

A pioneer in education, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum was the first museum created expressly for children when it was founded in 1899. Its success sparked the creation of similar institutions around the globe, and today the Museum continues as a world-class institution with community roots. With a recent expansion, all-new exhibits, and all-new programs, the Museum is now both the world’s oldest and the world’s newest children’s museum.

Brooklyn Children's Museum is a collecting museum. The Museum collects cultural objects and natural history specimens. A cultural object is something made by a person. It tells us about the person and about the society and time in which the person lives or lived. A natural history specimen can be an animal, a plant, an insect, a rock or a shell. We also collect fossils of plants and animals that lived millions of years ago. The Museum has nearly 30,000 objects and specimens.

The people who take care of the collection are called curators. They research the objects and write what they learn in the collections database. Curators add new objects to the collection, and decide which objects to exhibit. BCM invites visitors to curate their own exhibits in the Collections Central: Artifacts & Specimens gallery.