About The Children's Museum of Cleveland

The Children's Museum of Cleveland (CMC) is Northeast Ohio's destination for learning through play! With our community's youngest learners at the forefront of our work, CMC creates interactive learning experiences that allow young children to lead the way and discover the foundations of early learning through hands-on play. Our eight interactive exhibits are designed by early childhood education experts, offering dynamic environments for kids ages 0-8 to build the pillars of their early education as they explore, imagine, create, and collaborate with others. CMC serves nearly 200,000 individuals annually through our innovative facility, events, and educational programs.

Accessibility and equity are at the forefront of our work. We offer a range of free and reduced admissions programs, sponsored field trips and outreach programs, community events, and more to make our resources more accessible for low-income families across our community. CMC also hosts clean and safe visits for families with special needs so that our facility can be as accessible as possible to ALL children and families. Through partnerships with countless organizations that serve children and families across our region, CMC works continually to better connect Northeast Ohio families to our facility and resources.

WHAT KIDS LEARN AT CMC:

Cognitive Development: 
Our brains are built over time through the development of neural connections. The connections that we form in the first years of life provide either a strong or weak foundation for the connections that form later. As humans, our early learning experiences physically shape our brain architecture, which will serve as the foundation for all future learning, behavior, and health.  

We've all heard that young children's minds are like sponges. Maybe more accurately, they are like factories! In the first years of life, children develop more than 1 million new neural connections every second. This is the most active period of development in a human's life!

Needless to say, this timeframe is a vital time to engage children's curiosity, expose them to different experiences, and foster their creativity and imagination. At CMC, we have designed our exhibit experiences to support this growth. Our eight interactive exhibit spaces were created in a way that puts the child in the driver seat, and allows them to build this strong educational foundation in a way that just feels like play. Our exhibits offer opportunities to explore the foundation of STEM learning through experimentation, cause-and-effect play, observation, problem-solving, and critical thinking. We promote early literacy through our inviting family reading spaces filled with books that represent a diversity of experiences and stories. By making learning engaging and fun, we promote early interest and aspiration toward future learning, which helps light the path for a child's educational journey. 

Social-Emotional Development:
Children are not born knowing how to engage with their emotions, communicate with others, or express their thoughts and ideas. These skills are crucial to living a happy, healthy life, and need to be taught just as you would teach a child to count or read. CMC's exhibits are designed to promote open-ended and collaborative play. Exhibit components such as the farmer's market in Adventure City and our Theater stage are created to naturally encourage children to work as a team, voice their opinions, compromise, and problem-solve. These experiences help children develop their emotional intelligence, creativity, and confidence. 

Physical Development:
For our youngest children, learning how to use our bodies is essential to moving through life, feeling confident, growing independence, and feeling safe and secure. Our exhibits offer features that encourage children to develop their bodies through physical play, including gross motor skills like crawling, climbing, balancing, and movement, fine motor skills like grasping, pinching, and manipulating small objects, and developing spatial awareness that is foundational to STEM learning.