How to Make Museums Fun for Kids: Seven Objects Worth Finding

Most kids can do about twenty minutes in a museum.

You know the twenty minutes. They're interested, they're reading things, they're pointing. Then something goes out of them and they're asking how much longer, and you're standing in front of something remarkable trying to convince a seven year old to care about it.

I don't think kids hate museums. I think kids hate being passengers. They didn't plan the trip, they didn't pick the building, and now they're being walked past things in an order somebody else decided.

Here's what changes it. Give them one specific thing to find.

Not "let's go see the museum." Go find the diamond that people believe is cursed. Go find the airplane that was the first one to ever fly. Go find the rock that's famous for being disappointing.

Suddenly the building isn't a building. It's a map, and they're the one holding it.

A lot of American families are about to test this whether they meant to or not. It's the country's 250th birthday, the celebrations run all year, and millions of kids are going to get walked through Philadelphia and Washington this summer and fall. Most of them are going to hit the twenty minute wall standing in front of the Declaration of Independence.

They don't have to.

Seven objects worth hunting down

These are real things, sitting in real places, that your family can go stand in front of. Most of them are free.

The Hope Diamond

Where: National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC. Free.

A 45.52 carat blue diamond, roughly the size of a walnut, and the largest deep blue diamond in the world. It's also supposed to be cursed.

The story goes that it was pried out of the eye of a statue in India, and that everyone who owned it afterward met a bad end. A French king. A wealthy American widow who lost her son, her daughter, and her fortune. The Smithsonian's own historians have picked the legend apart and concluded it was mostly invented to sell newspapers and drive up the price, which is arguably a better story than a real curse.

And in 1958 the jeweler who owned it decided the American people should have it, so he sent it to Washington in the mail. A brown paper package, registered post, carried down from New York in a railway mail car and handed to the Smithsonian by a regular letter carrier named James Todd. The postage was $2.44. The other $142.85 was insurance, because the thing in the box was worth a million dollars.

The wrapper it arrived in is across town at the National Postal Museum, which is also free.

Kids do not need any convincing to go find this one.

The 1903 Wright Flyer

Where: National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. Free, timed passes required.

Not a copy. Not a model. The actual airplane that made the first flight, hanging in a room you can walk into.

The first flight it ever made lasted twelve seconds and covered 120 feet. You could throw a ball further. The best flight that day went 852 feet in 59 seconds, and then the wind flipped it over on the sand and it never flew again.

Two brothers who fixed bicycles for a living built it in Ohio, took it to a beach in North Carolina, and changed the shape of the entire century.

The Star-Spangled Banner

Where: National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Free.

The actual flag. And the real story is better than the one everybody knows.

Most people think this is the flag that flew through the night of bombardment at Fort McHenry in 1814. It isn't. A smaller storm flag flew through the shelling. This enormous one, thirty feet by forty two, was raised at dawn as the British fleet gave up and pulled away, to signal that the fort had held. That's what Francis Scott Key actually saw by the dawn's early light. Not a flag that survived the night. A fresh one going up to say we won. Key's poem blurred the two, and the blur stuck for two hundred years.

It's smaller now. Thirty by thirty four. For most of the 1800s the family who owned it snipped pieces off and gave them away to people they felt deserved a piece of history, and by the 1880s about a fifth of it was gone. The Smithsonian has tracked down thirteen or fourteen fragments but won't sew them back on, because nobody can prove which part of the flag they came from.

One of the fifteen stars is missing entirely, cut out sometime before 1873. The Smithsonian's own FAQ answers the question of where it went with three words: we don't know.

It lies now in a dim, climate controlled chamber, tilted at a slight angle, which is a strange and quiet thing to walk into.

The Declaration of Independence

Where: National Archives, Washington, DC. Free.

The actual document, in a titanium case filled with argon gas, so faded you can barely read most of it.

That's the part that gets kids. It's not a crisp historic document. It's a piece of paper that has had a hard life. It was rolled and unrolled until the parchment gave out, stuffed in a bag and carried out of Washington ahead of the British in 1814, and then hung on a wall facing a window in the Patent Office for thirty five years of direct sunlight. The ink never recovered.

John Hancock signed it in letters big enough to see across a room. Today you can just about make out the J.

And there's a handprint on it, near the bottom left, that someone appears to have tried to rub out. It isn't old damage. Photographs from 1903 show no handprint. Photographs from 1940 do. So somewhere in between, a person with access to the Declaration of Independence put their hand on it, and nobody knows who.

The Liberty Bell

Where: Liberty Bell Center, Philadelphia. Free.

Famous for being broken.

It cracked the very first time they rang it, in 1752, which is a genuinely funny fact that kids enjoy. Two local metalworkers named Pass and Stow melted it down and recast it. The tone was bad, so they broke it up and recast it a second time. That's the bell you're looking at, and their names are still on it.

Then it worked, more or less, for about ninety years. Sometime in the 1840s a thin crack appeared. In 1846 the city wanted it rung for Washington's birthday, so they tried to fix it with a technique called stop drilling, widening the crack so the two sides couldn't buzz against each other. That wide fissure everyone photographs is not the damage. It's the repair.

It didn't work. They rang it, a new hairline crack ran up through the word Liberty, and that was that. It has not been rung since 1846. A hundred and eighty years.

It's a bell that doesn't work, kept in a glass building, visited by millions of people. Twice a year someone taps it gently with a soft mallet.

One more for Philadelphia while you're there. On July 4 this year they buried a time capsule near Independence Mall, and it stays sealed for 250 years. Nobody alive today will see it opened. Your family can stand on the spot and do the math on who will.

Plymouth Rock

Where: Pilgrim Memorial State Park, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Free, open sunrise to sunset.

This is the one I'd send a family to first, because it is famously, gloriously disappointing.

There's no building. No ticket, no gift shop, no exhibit. You walk up to a stone canopy on the waterfront and look down into a pit, and there's a rock in it. It's smaller than a kitchen table. At high tide it partly disappears under water. Roughly a third of the original boulder is left.

Here's why. In 1774 the townspeople decided to move it, hitched up thirty teams of oxen, and broke it in half in the process. The top half went to the town square. Sixty years later they moved it again. For a century, visitors chipped pieces off to take home, hundreds of pounds of it, until there was barely anything left. Someone eventually carved "1620" on it so people would know what they were looking at.

Also, no one can prove the Pilgrims ever stepped on it. The whole story comes from one 95 year old man in 1741 who said he'd been told about it.

Visit the rock and then spend the rest of the day exploring Plymouth.

The Flame of Liberty

Where: Place de l'Alma, Paris. Free, outdoors, always there. Metro: Alma-Marceau.

A full size gold covered replica of the flame from the Statue of Liberty's torch, standing on a marble base in the middle of a Paris traffic circle. And it closes a loop that started in Philadelphia 150 years ago.

The Statue of Liberty was France's gift to the United States, and it was meant to arrive for America's 100th birthday in 1876. It wasn't close to ready. The only piece finished in time was the right arm holding the torch, so France shipped that across the Atlantic on its own, and it went on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Visitors bought a ticket, climbed a ladder up inside the arm, and stood on the little balcony that rings the flame.

The rest of the statue turned up ten years late, in 350 pieces.

In 1986 the flame was so weathered it had to be replaced, and French craftsmen did the work. Three years later, as a thank you, a replica of that new flame was given to Paris. It was dedicated in May 1989 and it has been sitting in that traffic circle ever since, free, outdoors, no ticket, no hours.

That's the part I like. It isn't there for any anniversary. It's just there, and it has been for nearly forty years, and most of the people walking past it have no idea it's a copy of a torch that once stood in a park in Philadelphia. If your family's trip is to Paris rather than the East Coast, this is the one to go find.

One thing to know before you go. It sits directly above the tunnel where Princess Diana died in 1997, and people began leaving flowers almost immediately. The square is now named after her, and there are usually notes and photographs at the base. Worth knowing so it doesn't catch you off guard with kids.

Four of these are in one city

Look at the list again. The Hope Diamond, the Wright Flyer, the Star-Spangled Banner, and the Declaration of Independence are all in Washington, DC, within walking distance of each other on and around the National Mall. All four are free.

That's a great day for a kid who's hunting. Four legendary objects, one afternoon, no admission.

Add Philadelphia and Plymouth and you've got six of the seven on a single East Coast trip.

The timing is not an accident. Philadelphia and Washington are where the country is throwing itself a 250th birthday party this year, and the Smithsonian has programming running across its museums all the way through 2026. Which means these two cities are about to be full of families, and full of kids being walked past extraordinary things without much idea why they should care.

And if your summer isn't Philadelphia, the eighth one is waiting in Paris, and has been for nearly forty years. The flame that stood in a Philadelphia park for America's 100th birthday has a twin sitting in a traffic circle by the Seine, free, whenever you get there. American history is findable abroad, which is a thing kids don't expect and adults forget.

How to run this on your own trip

You don't need an app to do this. The parent who does it best is just doing three things.

Pick the object, not the building. "We're going to the Museum of Natural History" is a chore. "We're going to find a cursed diamond that somebody mailed in the post" is a mission. Same afternoon, completely different perspective.

Tell them the story before you go. Ten minutes in the car is enough. A kid who knows the Liberty Bell broke the first time they rang it walks in wanting to see the crack. A kid who knows nothing walks past a bell.

Make some of the finds easy. Not every mission should be hard. Mix in a couple your kid will nail immediately, because early wins are what keep them going when the next one takes longer.

And name the mission after them. They'll love it.

The part that matters

Every one of these objects is a little disappointing if you don't know its story. A faded page. A broken bell. A small wet rock.

Every one of them is unforgettable if you do.

Three of them aren't in a museum at all. A rock in a park, a flame in a traffic circle, a bell in a glass pavilion. It was never about the building.

Every Thursday I send families one story from history and the places where you can go live it. It's free. The Weekend History Hunt.

In the DuckAbroad app

All eight of these are in DuckAbroad as relics for kids to track down, along with more than 350 destinations around the world.

Make your child the hero of your next trip. DuckAbroad is built so your kid is the explorer, not the one asking how much longer. They read the story before they go, hunt down the object when they get there, and keep a record of everywhere their adventures have taken them.

Free to try for 14 days. iOS | Android

FAQ

How do I make museums fun for kids? Give them one specific object to find instead of touring the whole building. A kid who walks in hunting for something has a mission. A kid who walks in to "see the museum" has an errand. Tell them the object's story before you arrive, and let them lead the way to it.

Why do kids get bored in museums? Most kids last about twenty minutes. The issue usually isn't the museum, it's that the child had no say in being there and no role once they arrive. Giving them something to find, and letting them be the one who knows the story, changes their role from passenger to explorer.

What famous historical objects can families see for free? Many of the most famous objects in the United States are free to visit. The Hope Diamond, the Star-Spangled Banner, the 1903 Wright Flyer, and the Declaration of Independence are all free in Washington, DC. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts are also free.

Is Plymouth Rock worth visiting? It depends entirely on whether you know the story. The rock itself is small, sits in a pit, and partly submerges at high tide, which disappoints visitors expecting a monument. But the story of how it got that way, broken by thirty teams of oxen and chipped apart by souvenir hunters for a century, is one kids genuinely enjoy. It's free, and it takes ten minutes.

How do I visit America's 250th anniversary sites with kids without them getting bored? Pick objects, not itineraries. The 250th brings big crowds to Philadelphia and Washington, and a child being walked through a packed historic site with no role in it will check out fast. Give them one specific thing to find in each place, tell them its story in the car, and let them lead you to it. The Liberty Bell, the Declaration of Independence, and the Star-Spangled Banner all work for this, and all three are free.

What is the Hope Diamond curse? The story claims the diamond was stolen from a statue in India and that its owners met terrible ends. The Smithsonian's own historians have concluded the curse was largely invented and publicized to build the stone's fame and value. The 45.52 carat diamond is at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, free to visit. It arrived there in 1958 by registered mail from New York, with $2.44 in postage and $142.85 in insurance.