That’s Sandy Malmquist directing one of the 15,000 curious guests she welcomes every year, many of them under two feet tall. She is the director of the Connecticut Children’s Museum, one of New Haven’s quiet treasures. Just who is this little fellow and was Director Malmquist successful? Follow along, and we shall see.
The event in question was the regular Saturday afternoon “Creating Readers” family literacy event, a kind of musical reading of the book Potato Joe, by Keith Baker, with local singer George Melillo. The event drew close to 100 kids, parents, and grandparent Saturday to the museum on the corner of Wall and Orange.
Many, like Felicitas Castellanos (on the right, with her two kids, Litzy and Eric and Malmquist and bilingual staffer Melissa Pena), are regulars at the museum. That’s thanks, in part, to free and growing access to museums, libraries, and theaters in the greater New Haven area sponsored by a program called PACK.
Created six years ago by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, PACK stands for “parents and communities for kids.” It provides free passes to 14 institutions in New Haven, Hamden, and Ansonia for programs, many arts and literacy-based, that promote the idea of family learning, or to use the program’s phrase, that a parent is a child’s first and best teacher.
Or a grandparent. Certainly that was the case as Joe Zutant was experiencing some pleasurable family learning with his 10-month-old granddaughter Emma, who was discovering that those round shiny things ring, if you just shake them enough.
Zutant and his wife had the grandkids this afternoon because the parents were just back from vacation. They live in Shelton, but went online, and discovered the site of the Connecticut Children’s Museum. “Emma’s parents need to unwind, so we’ve got the kids, and here we are. It’s a great place.”
Malmquist says that typically 40 percent of the visitors are from New Haven. This overcast, misty August Saturday was atypical, with many locals away, and visitors coming through from other towns.
Much of the outreach is to families who may not know of or avail themselves of a place like the museum. Castellanos, for example, runs her own small family home care business for six kids. “Two Thursdays a month,” said Malmquist, “she and many other providers come here for a literacy-based event with their kids. This Thursday, for example, each kid will receive a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, to take home, a toy connected with the book, and also a pass to the museum for the kids to bring home to their parents.”
The idea is for those passes, provided by PACK, to be a kind of pleasure lure to bring the kids’ parents to the museum, as a family, for an event like Saturday’s. The programs for day care providers are largely in Spanish.
The museum is open to the public only Friday and Saturday. The other days of the week are given over to field trips for day care providers and their kids. Through a special relationship with the bilingual John Daniels School, every Pre‑K, K, first and second-grade class also comes to the museum. These kids also receive books, learning toys, and free PACK passes to come back to the Saturday Creating Readers events. “We give books, English and Spanish, to the kids, and the passes and hope to ride on their enthusiasm to get new families in.”
Many of the kids’ parents may be working days and nights. So the family learning events, usually with a singer or dancer doing a performance, and then book and toy take home component, also take place on Saturday night.
Lauren Liss of Hamden, for example, and her three-year-old Leo were in the museum’s naturalist room, where he was into the bugs. “Actually,” said his mom, “he’s into superheroes. At his age the large yellow stuffed queen bees, with their speckled black wings strewn across the floor, made him feel he was in superhero heaven.” Liss said there was nothing quite like the museum, and that she would be back.
Leo was in the museum’s naturalist room. Here, lo and behold, in the linguistic room, was the little guy Malmquist was talking to earlier, Christian Cox, age six, along with his older sister Madison. “Each of the rooms in the museum,” explained Malmquist, “is devoted to one of the eight types of intelligence, or ways people learn. We’re based on the theory of multiple intelligence pioneered by Howard Gardner.”
So that the Cox kids, with their grandparents nearby, in the linguistic room, stepped, in effect, directly into a fantasy of Goodnight, Moon. The room is entirely equipped with images and materials related to the famous kids going-to-bed book.
Malmquist, who built the museum around her Creating Kids day care center, which operates in the building, is a firm believer in creating events and atmospheres that promote grown-ups and kids learning together.
“That’s why,” she said, as Manuel Negreros and Madison Cox rearranged the entire text of Goodnight Moon, in English, Spanish, and Braille, “we would much rather spend the funds we have on a an artist or storyteller singing to the kids, and then we have a book to give them and a pass to come back. That’s so much more important that blockbuster exhibits. We don’t want 500 people a day moving through here. There is a quiet,warm, community feeling in here that promotes the grown-ups lying on the floor with their kids, not sitting on benches in the hall. “We are a very word-of-mouth” kind of place.
Which is why Negreros’ daughter, Kiara (being comforted by her mom Maria), was crying. She had had such a good time with the queen bees and in the Good Night, Moon room she didn’t want to leave. Maria Negreros said they didn’t have anything like this in Hartford, where they reside, and they promised their daughter they would be back, but she still cried a little.
And what had brought them in today? Ah, Negreros is Felicitas Castellanos’ brother-in-law. She had given the Negreros a PACK pass.