Making tomorrow’s builders today

By Adam Jones
Star Staff Writer
06-12-2003

Reid Shafer, 7, plumbs the sink in the hands-on exhibit on homebuilding. Photo: Kevin Qualls. There’s a house being built inside the Anniston Museum of Natural History, and children are the builders. The museum is displaying the “Building Our House” exhibit in its changing exhibits gallery. The exhibit is an interactive model house designed for children and allows a child to experience all phases of building. “It’s a very popular exhibit because of the nature of the interactivity involved,” said Susan Robertson, marketing director for the museum. The exhibit was designed by the Homebuilders Association of Alabama and brought to the Anniston Museum of Natural History by the Homebuilders Association of Calhoun County. The exhibit is a simple, white wooden structure with a wooden door. The back of the house is a wood frame, allowing children to see what’s beneath the walls. Inside, children can connect pipes to the kitchen sink, choose color for the interior walls and see how electrical wires snake through a house frame. Outside the house, the brick chimney is incomplete, and children can lay foam bricks in the holes. There’s a power line that lights up, but it can be turned off at the switch box, which shows how electricity travels from power line to front porch light.

Young visitors to the Anniston Museum of Natural History can get a lesson in homebuilding. Photo: Kevin Qualls. Learning doesn’t stop at the house. Children can play in a sandbox, moving sand with dump trucks to make room for the foundation. But before the foundation can be laid, children can look through the surveyor’s scope and complete blueprints with crayons. Of course, children will need to wear the hard hats through the construction area. Children can even move cardboard flowers, getting a little grip on landscaping. Patient visitors can use the Kid CAD, a simple Computer Aided Drawing program. On the computer, parents can help their child build a house or a farm from foundation up. Children from pre-K to eighth grade enjoy the exhibit, Robertson said, but so do parents and grandparents. The exhibit allows for children to interact with adults, which keeps visitors at the exhibit. “They are spending a lot of time back there,” Robertson said. The exhibit requires classroom skills of math and science, and it also encourages teamwork “They don’t realize they are learning while at the exhibit,” she said. The exhibit will be in Anniston until Nov. 30. Robertson said they wanted to give school groups the opportunity to visit. The exhibit comes with a teaching companion, and Robertson said it fits into state curriculum. Admission to the museum is $4.50 for an adult, $3.50 for children ages 4 to 17 and children 3 and under get in free. For more information, contact the museum at 256-237-6766 or visit on line at www.annistonmuseum.org.

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