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Awards

MetLife Foundation and Association of Children's Museums Promising Practice Award MetLife Foundation and Association of Children's Museums
Promising Practice Replication Award
Universal Design for Learning Award Great Friend to Kids Award

MetLife Foundation and Association of Children's Museums Promising Practice Award
For the past eight years, ACM has received a grant from the MetLife Foundation to develop the MetLife Foundation and Association of Children's Museums Promising Practice Award. The award honors excellence and provides recognition for innovative and creative practices in U.S. children's museums; promotes management practices which support alternative and creative programming; builds a body of knowledge of exemplary programs and practices; and establishes models for the advancement of the children's museum field at large.

Good physical and emotional health is crucial to learning and growth from birth to adulthood. Healthy attitudes and habits start at home, but families face significant barriers to making good choices. Children’s museums have the ability to bring attention to issues related to child development and to convene important discussions among community-based organizations, media partners and policy makers.

The 2008 Promising Practice Award will honor exhibits, programs and management practices that promote the importance of outdoor play and activity as a key component of healthy living. The application processed is closed for the 2008 awards. Museum award recipients will be announced at InterActivity 2008: Let's Play in Denver, Colorado, Friday, April 25.

Congratulations to the 2007 winners:

  • Children's Museum of Skagit County (Mount Vernon, WA) received a $5,000 Promising Practice Award for its outreach to low-income families. In working with different cultural groups in its region, as well community agencies, Children's Museum of Skagit County recognized that a model of "if we build it, they will come" does not always work. Therefore, this museum goes out in the community, arranges transportation to the museum for field trips and special events on a variety of health topics. Community Free Days are promoted widely and scheduled regularly for families. Through signage and interpretation services in multiple languages, the museum is able to serve a more diverse group of families.

  • Stepping Stones Museum for Children (Norwalk, CT) received a $7,500 Promising Practice Award for its children's health initiative. Key project components include: a series of eight health vignettes broadcast on Connecticut Public Television during children's programming; statewide community outreach including travel kiosks and travel kits; health educational programs designed to reach schools and groups, afterschool programs, families, educators and community organizations; and a fifteen-hundred square-foot traveling exhibit of multi-sensory games and problem-solving activities called "Healthyville."

  • The Children's Museum of Houston (TX) was presented with a $7,500 Promising Practice Award for its Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies program. Designed not as a stand-alone program, Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies is integrated with long-standing and familiar programs at 30 elementary schools and at 20 branches of the city public library system and the museum. By presenting new material in settings where low-income families already visit and trust, the barriers to reach these families are reduced. Three separate evaluations of the Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies program conducted by university and public sector researchers have indicated 100 percent satisfaction among Spanish-speaking audiences and school administrators.

Congratulations to the 2007 honorable mention applicants. Each of the three museums received a registration scholarship to InterActivity 2008 in Denver.

  • Madison Children's Museum (WI) for its fundraising policy, which states that the museum will seek corporate sponsors whose projects or services are consistent with what the museum values - respect for all children, community connections, sustainability and play as the natural way to learn.

  • The Discovery Center at Murfree Spring (Murfreesboro, TN) for its four-month, family-focused nutrition and exercise program called "Discovering Healthy Families," which is run in partnership with Middle Tennessee State University, StoneCrest Medical Center and the local American Heart Association.

  • Amazement Square, The Rightmire Children's Museum (Lynchburg, VA) for its "Healthy Heads, Hands and Hearts" program that is carried out through a unique educational cartoon series published daily in the local newspaper and through series of in-house and outreach programs. The program brings attention to the importance of nutrition and physical activity and the negative impact of drug abuse.

MetLife Foundation and Association of Children's Museums Promising Practice Replication Award

In 2004, MetLife Foundation and ACM established the Replication Award, a $10,000 restricted grant for former Promising Practice Award recipients to create an online "tool kit" and InterActivity training session so that other children's museums may learn how to create a similar, museum-tested, award-winning program in their own communities.

The application processed for the 2008 award is closed. The museum award recipient will be announced at InterActivity 2008: Let's Play in Denver, Colorado, Friday, April 25.

Congratulations to the 2007 Promising Practice Replication Award winner.

  • Minnesota Children's Museum (St. Paul) was awarded the 2007 Promising Practice Replication Award. The Replication Award is open to previous Promising Practice Award recipients and provides the winner a $10,000 grant to develop a tool kit to further share the award-winning practice with the children's museum field. Minnesota Children's Museum's Wakanheza initiative was first recognized in 2006 with a Promising Practice Award. (Wakanheza is the Dakota word for "child" and the closest English translation is "sacred being.") By providing remarkably simple yet powerful responses to two common questions - When I see a parent and child struggling in public, what can I do to step in and improve the situation? And, is there something I can do to prevent these difficult situations in the first place? - the Wakanheza initiative seeks to improve the treatment of children, youth and families.

Click Here to view Summaries of Promising Practice Award Entries, 1999-2007

View a PDF of the commemorative publication celebrating 10 years of the Promising Practice Award!


Universal Design for Learning Award
VSA arts and ACM share a commitment to inclusive and accessible learning through hands-on learning experiences. Creating new opportunities is an ongoing challenge. In an effort to advance knowledge and best practices, VSA arts and ACM are pleased to present the inaugural year of the Universal Design for Learning Award. The award is an innovative collaboration that will identify model programs in children’s museums that demonstrate learning standards for inclusive practice and provide sub-awards and technical assistance to the selected museums to refine and document their practices for dissemination.

The application processed is closed for the 2008 awards. Museum award recipients will be announced at InterActivity 2008: Let's Play in Denver, Colorado, Friday, April 25.

Congratulations to the 2007 Universal Design for Learning recipients:

The three 2007 Universal Design for Learning Award winners received $15,000 grants to support exhibits and initiatives that demonstrate learning standards for inclusive practice.

  • Kohl Children's Museum of Greater Chicago (Glenview, IL) received a Universal Design for Learning Award for providing exhibit activities that stimulate all children's senses and for planning its new facility using the principles of Universal Design. For example, equipping signage with simple fonts and high contrast backgrounds makes a world of difference to children with visual limitations. All handles, pulls and other manually operated devises are easy to grasp with one hand and do not require twisting of the wrist to operate. Interactive exhibit components are positioned to be usable from both forward and side approaches and a reachable distance. In the museum's exhibit "All About Me" young children learn about and experience the joy of their own physical abilities, not measured against other children. Activities for children include pinpression formations and using switch-activated cameras to see their body from all angles - from the top of their head to the soles of their shoes or the rubber from their wheel chairs.

  • Connecticut Children's Museum (New Haven) accepted a Universal Design for Learning Award for its Accessible Art Works program. Created based on the principle that art and artists should be accessible to all children. Local artists, some with disabilities, some without, come to the museum to read children's picture books and to perform the book in their own particular artistic genre. An American Sign Language interpreter signs the book and a Braille copy of the book is available. (More than 200 of the museum's collection of picture books are Brailled). Following the book reading, children then are given opportunities to explore the ideas and themes presented in the story. For example, after reading a Tommy dePaola's book Charlie Needs a Cloak, children watch museum staff act out the story with authentic props-carding the wool shorn from a life-size sheep and spinning it onto the spool. Later the children are given a small loom and loops with which to work their own weaving magic.

  • DuPage Children's Museum (Naperville, IL) took home its Universal Design for Learning Award for its ongoing, 15-year commitment that all local families have full access to the museum's exhibits and programs. In 1992, the museum launched its Community Access Network Initiative, which now includes formal partnerships with 50 social service agencies, through 75 different programs, for families living in poverty, recent immigrants, children with physical and other disabilities, children living in residential treatment programs and those who have been designated as at risk of abuse or neglect. Additionally, the museum offers a Third Thursday program for families of children with autism as a way of helping these families to feel more comfortable visiting the museum and as a vehicle to help other families understand the unique challenges and joys of raising children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Click Here to view summaries of Universal Design for Learning Award applicants.

Great Friend to Kids Award
The Great Friend to Kids Award is presented annually at the Association of Children's Museums' InterActivity conference. The award honors those who have made significant and outstanding contributions to strengthening education and advancing the interests of children.

  • ACM is pleased to announce that the 2008 Great Friend to Kids Award will be presented to Joe L. Frost, Ed.D., L.H.D., InterActivity 2008: Let's Play during the Saturday, April 26, plenary session. Dr. Frost, who is Parker Centennial Professor Emeritus for the University of Texas at Austin, was selected for his national leadership in the education community, his groundbreaking work on children's play and his dedication to advocate for a child's right to play.

  • Past recipients include Dr. Bettye Caldwell, Dr. Julius B. Richmond and Dr. Edward F. Zigler (2007) for their roles as architects and early founders of the Head Start program, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton (2006) Erikson Institute (2005), Kevin Clash (2004), Barbara Pierce Bush (2003), UNICEF (2002), Dr. David Elkind (2001), Dr. Robert Coles (2000), Children's Television Workshop (1999), First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton (1998), Dr. James P. Comer (1997),Fred Rogers (1996), Dr. Ernest L. Boyer (1995), Peggy Charren (1994), Marian Wright Edelman (1993), Dr. Howard Gardner (1992), and Michael Spock (1991). Click here for details on each of the Great Friend to Kids Award recipients.

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