Please Touch Museum

Please Touch Museum’s Mission is to Enrich the Lives of Children by Creating Learning Opportunities Through Play.We strive to make the Museum a place that reflects our Core Values: Caring and Collaborative Playful and Fun Creative and Innovative Learning and Educational Child-centered and Family-focused Safe and Clean Respectful and Diverse The year was 1976. Pet rocks, bellbottom pants, and disco were all the rage. In Philadelphia, as the nation gathered to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with spectacular Bicentennial festivities, Please Touch Museum opened its doors to the public. On Sunday, October 2, in a 2,200 square foot space tucked away in a small corner between the dinosaur skeletons and wooly mammoths at the Academy of Natural Sciences, a dozen parents, educators, and artists led by Sperr, a Montessori educator, came together to offer over 400 visitors, patiently waiting in line, a new kind of museum—a hands-on environment in which “learning was child’s play.” Please Touch Museum was a pilot project, with a small staff and a small budget, but it was the first museum ever dedicated to serving children ages 7 and under. For three short hours, children played, weighed and, of course, touched their way through exhibits that engaged their senses and ignited their imaginations, while parents fought the instinctive urge to warn, “Don’t touch that!”