COUNTYWIDE : Museum Exhibits a Talent for Fun

Eric Tate raced through the Children’s Museum at La Habra on a recent morning, playing with everything he saw.

He hopped into the driver’s seat of an Orange County Transportation Authority bus and started spinning the steering wheel, then took hold of the microphone. “First stop, Santa’s Village,” announced the 3-year-old boy from Diamond Bar. “Second stop, Magic Mountain. Third stop, Disneyland.”

With his mother, Lisa Tate, close behind him, Eric led the way through all the museum’s exhibits, asking countless questions at each stop.

He put on a puppet show, dressed up as a cowboy, dug for dinosaur bones, pumped fake gasoline, performed science experiments, milked a stuffed cow, pet stuffed wild animals, rode a carousel and became a radio announcer--all in under two hours.

“This is a nice place for Eric to play and pretend,” his mother said. “A lot of times we take our kids to places where they can’t touch, and here they can touch everything. . . . It’s a good way of providing a learning experience.”

The 12,500-square-foot facility opened in 1977 as the state’s first children’s museum and today is the only one of its kind in Orange County. Museum officials call it a “hands-on learning facility where imaginations are stimulated.”

More than 200,000 guests--mostly children--visit the place annually, said Melissa Banning, the museum’s assistant director.

“A lot of children come here on field trips from school because this is an education-based facility,” she said. “The exhibits complement the traditional education process. It enables kids to go into a museum, experience it and become involved with it. By participating, they learn.”

A group of children from Laguna Niguel recently toured the museum with a docent who explained each exhibit.

“Paleontologists are the people who dig for bones,” docent Dorothy Fite told the children, before letting them loose in a giant sandbox, where they searched for replicas of dinosaur fossils.

“This is cool,” said 6-year-old Evan Lebeau. “They have lots of stuff for us to touch here. I like the bones the best.”

Besides the exhibits, the museum also offers family workshops, art workshops, outreach programs, storytelling and assorted performances that include magic and puppet shows, museum officials said.

The museum is at 301 Euclid St. in a renovated 1923 Union Pacific Railroad depot. Admission is $3.50. The museum is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m.