Zeum - Fun and games for the whole family

I've been wanting to take my kids to this museum for a long time, but we seem to have never had the time to attend it. Today after doing school and eating an early lunch, we headed straight to San Francisco. This museum is found right down town and is located amongst many high rises. Fortunately, the city planners had built beautiful gardens around and across the street, a castle looking playground, and an enormous carousel next to the building. We spent about four hours at the museum, and about an hour in the gardens. Needless to say, we had an amazing time. This museum offered all sorts of hands-on activities. My children were able to act and produce their own movie; they made their own clay figures and recorded their own claymation movie; they sang and performed and had their performance recorded; they made up puppet stories; they had fun with the green screen ,and they learned about digital technology by editing various pictures. Here some pictures (some of them aren't very good, because I took the pictures from the TV monitor):

The children made up their story of alien sighting in San Francisco. Gillian was the news reporter and Jefferson was the alien leader. I totally let them do their own thing, and they just made me laugh out loud. They recorded their creation and were very proud to show it to their dad when they got home.

There was this green slide surrounded completely by green walls and floor, and the kids would choose their backgrounds at the kiosk by the camera and they would have fun pretending they were in that particular place. The clouds and the ocean were my favorites:

The children had tremendous fun playing with clay and making their own creations. Then, Gillian made a story and recorded her own claymation movie. They were astonished at the miracle of putting pictures together and turning them into one cool movie. Gillian and I had made cowboys out of our clay, and she made a story of two cowboys stranded in an island with only one person boat. They had a duel, and her cowboy won and took the boat to a faraway land, where he became king, helped by the treasure he had found on the island. There were several background props, and several stages that the kids could put their clay figures, each accompanied by a camera. James and Jefferson made their own videos as well.

Afterward, the children had fun editing digital pictures by using different kinds of backgrounds, paint, stickers, and whatever else they were interested in. For a break, I sat down to enjoy a puppet show, produced by James:
The children played dress up and then recorded themselves:
When we were all done with mostly everything that there was to be seen and done, Gillian gathered her courage and decided to perform a song. I got all of their recordings in DVDs, and I'll post them as soon as I can convert them. Gillian sounded like a nightingale.

When we were sure we were done with everything in the museum (after going back several times at their favorite spots), we left the museum, and headed to the playground nearby. After a while we were all getting hungry, so we walked to the Yerba Buena Gardens, where we sat and ate our picnic dinner on the lawn and enjoyed the waterfalls of the Martin Luther King Memorial.

On the way home, everyone of my children fell asleep in the car, while I patiently fought the traffic rage. Thank goodness for music and NPR!