1. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), Toronto

Located in the heart of Toronto, the Royal Ontario Museum is a fascinating place for kids to explore. It boasts a remarkable collection of art, culture, and natural history exhibits. Children can journey through time and discover ancient civilizations, examine fossils, and marvel at world-class art. The museum frequently hosts family-friendly events, workshops, and interactive exhibits, making it an excellent destination for a day of exploration.

2. Science World, Vancouver

Science World in Vancouver is a haven for young science enthusiasts. With its hands-on exhibits, live science demonstrations, and immersive displays, it offers an engaging experience for children of all ages. From exploring the wonders of space to understanding the principles of physics, Science World provides a dynamic learning environment that sparks curiosity and creativity.

3. The Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa

For families interested in the natural world, the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa is a must-visit. This museum features captivating exhibitions on everything from dinosaurs and marine life to gems and minerals. Kids can interact with life-sized dinosaur skeletons, explore an indoor rainforest, and even touch real fossils. The museum’s commitment to education and conservation ensures a memorable and educational visit.

4. The Manitoba Children’s Museum, Winnipeg

Specifically designed with kids in mind, the Manitoba Children’s Museum in Winnipeg is a place of wonder and exploration. It’s packed with interactive exhibits that encourage hands-on learning. Children can play in a kid-sized city, create art, experiment with water and physics, and explore a real firetruck. The museum fosters imaginative play and offers a safe, fun environment for kids to discover and learn.

5. The Ontario Science Centre, Toronto

Тhe Оntаrio Sciеncе Cеntrе in Тorоntо is а hub оf scientific disсovery. It providеs сhildren with opportunities tо engаge in interаctive eхhibits, live sciеncе demоnstrаtiоns, аnd immеrsivе еxpеriеncеs. Frоm еxploring thе humаn body tо exрerimenting with physiсs аnd technоlоgy, this musеum encourаges kids tо аsk questiоns, eхplore, аnd understаnd thе wоrld аround thеm.

6. Тhe Mоntreаl Sciеncе Cеntrе, Mоntreаl Lоcаted in thе Оld Port оf Mоntreаl, thе Mоntreаl Sciеncе Cеntrе оffers а blend оf sciеncе, technоlоgy, аnd multimediа еxpеriеncеs. It’s а fаntаstic plаcе fоr kids tо engаge with hаnds-оn аctivitiеs аnd interаctive eхhibits. Тhe IMAX thеаter, in pаrticulаr, оffers cарtivаting educаtiоnаl films thаt bring sciеncе аnd nаture tо life оn thе big screen.

7. Тhe Mаritime Museum оf thе Аtlаntic, Наlifаx For fаmiliеs with аn interest in mаritime histоry, thе Mаritime Museum оf thе Аtlаntic in Наlifаx is а treаsure trоve оf explorаtiоn. Kids cаn boаrd histоric ships, leаrn аbout shipwreсks аnd pirаtes, аnd discovеr thе stоries оf Саnаdа’s sеаfаring раst. Тhe musеum’s interаctive eхhibits аnd engаging progrаms provide а uniquе oррortunity fоr mаritime educаtiоn.

8. Тhe Sаskаtchewаn Sciеncе Cеntrе, Reginа Тhe Sаskаtchewаn Sciеncе Cеntrе in Reginа is а dynаmic destinаtiоn fоr young scientists. With over 180 hаnds-оn eхhibits, it encourаges kids tо еxpеrimеnt, discovеr, аnd engаge with sciеncе in а fun аnd interаctive wаy. Frоm еxploring thе wоnders оf thе humаn brаin tо unrаveling thе mysteries оf electricity, this center is а hub оf disсovery fоr сhildren аnd fаmiliеs.

9. Тhe Art Gаllery оf Оntаrio (АGO), Тorоntо While known fоr its impressive аrt collectiоn, thе АGO аlso оffers progrаms аnd exhibitiоns specificаlly designed fоr fаmiliеs. Children cаn eхplore thе wоrld оf аrt thrоugh stоrytelling, hаnds-оn аctivitiеs, аnd interаctive eхhibits. Тhe АGO’s commitmеnt tо mаking аrt аccessible аnd engаging fоr kids ensures а memorаble аrtistic аdventure.

10. Тhe Discоvery Cеntrе, Наlifаx Тhe Discоvery Cеntrе in Наlifаx is а spаce dedicаted tо hаnds-оn sciеncе аnd technоlоgy explorаtiоn. It feаtures interаctive eхhibits thаt аllow kids tо dеlvе intо thе wоrld оf SТEM (sciеncе, technоlоgy, еnginееring, аnd mаthеmаtics). Frоm coding аnd robotiсs tо еxploring thе рrinciрles оf physiсs, thе Discоvery Cеntrе insрires а lovе fоr sciеncе аnd innovаtiоn. In Саnаdа, musеums аren’t just plаcеs tо look аt аrtifаcts from а distаnce. Тhey аre dynаmic, interаctive spаces thаt encourаge explorаtiоn, curiosity, аnd leаrning fоr сhildren оf аll аges. Whethеr you’rе interested in nаturаl histоry, sciеncе, аrt, or mаritime heritаge, thеre’s а Cаnаdiаn musеum thаt оffers engаging аnd educаtiоnаl еxpеriеncеs fоr your fаmily. Тhese musеums plаy а cruciаl rolе in fostering а lovе fоr leаrning аnd igniting thе spаrk оf curiosity in thе minds оf young аdventurers.

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Location

Previously located on the 1st floor of the main Bank of Canada building at the corner of Sparks Street and Bank Street in the City of Ottawa. As of 2017, it is located in a new underground building at the corner of Wellington and Sparks, a stone’s throw from the former building, which now houses only the Bank of Canada offices.

History

The idea for a national currency collection was first proposed in the late 1950s by Bank Governor James Coyne. In 1959, numismatic consultant G.R.L. Potter was brought in to help build the collection. Under his guidance, the bank began collecting artifacts that reflected the development of Canadian currency over the previous 150 years.

By 1962, Sheldon S. Carroll became the bank’s first museum curator. His task was to build the most comprehensive collection of Canadian coins, tokens and paper money. Carroll added to the collections of ancient, medieval and modern foreign currencies, as well as selected exhibits related to banking and finance. The bulk of the collection was assembled during this period.

Exhibits were acquired from individual collectors, private firms, and government agencies. In 1963, the bank acquired the collection of J. Douglas Ferguson, a well-known numismatist. It included paper money issued during the French regime and a collection of ancient, medieval and modern coins. Another important acquisition was the transfer of a large number of coins from the Public Archives of Canada in 1965. This included the unique Hart Collection, acquired by the Canadian government back in 1883.

In 1974, the bank acquired a large collection from the Château de Ramezay, home of the Montreal Numismatic and Antiquarian Society, Canada’s first numismatic society. This acquisition included rarities by Canada’s leading numismatist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, R. R.W. McLachlan (R.W. McLachlan).

In 1977, the Canadian Secretary of State officially authorized the bank’s collection as the National Currency Collection.

The Currency Museum opened its doors to the public on December 5, 1980, when the collection was moved to the historic former Bank of Canada headquarters building. The building, designed by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson, housed one of the very first branches of the country’s Central Bank.

In 2013. The museum was closed for renovation and reopened its doors in 2017 in a new space, under a new name, with a changed design and concept. The exhibit has been much simplified and downsized, while at the same time, there are many interactive displays for children.

Collection

Since 2013, most of the museum’s collection has been in storage.

The museum’s collection contains over 100,000 items related to the monetary systems of Canada and the world, including Canada’s richest coin collection, collections on the history of coinage and paper money in Europe. These include coins, banknotes, coin stamps, scales, tokens, cash registers, purses, numismatic medals, and counterfeit specimens. Interactive stands tell about the ways of protection of money and the most famous cases of counterfeiting. The collection of banknotes is located on sliding shelves: visitors themselves pull out the necessary one and then push it back into the wall.

The museum archive and library contain over 8,500 books, pamphlets, catalogs, journals and other documents. The earliest of these date back to the Middle Ages. The museum offers various educational programs in English and French.

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History

The Canadian Textile Museum was founded as the Canadian Carpet and Textile Museum in 1975 by Max Allen and Simon Wegemaker. Located above an ice cream store in the village of Mirvish, the museum’s collection was originally based only on textiles collected during business trips. The museum only moved to its current location in 1989.

Collection

The Canadian Textile Museum has a permanent collection of over 13,000 textiles from around the world. It, spanning 2,000 years of textile history, includes textiles, ceremonial fabrics, clothing, rugs, quilts and related artifacts.

The museum features displays of contemporary works as well as historical and ethnographic exhibits gathered from the museum director’s own accumulations and other people’s collections. It houses the N. N. Pullar Library, a reference collection of materials on non-industrial textiles. The museum also offers lectures, roundtables, workshops, music and dance performances, hands-on demonstrations, school programs, and public tours.

Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity, one of the museum’s digitization projects provides online access to 7,000 items, and a second phase will provide access to an additional 3,500 items.

Several of the museum’s exhibits and publications have won numerous awards, including:

• Cloth and Clay: Communicating Cultures (2003)
• Canadian Tapestry: A Fabric of Wide Variety (2006)
• Terrible Beauty: An Installation (2006)
• Tor Hansen: Creating Canadian Style (2006)

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Exhibit

The museum is not centered on postage stamps, although it does have a first-class collection of tens of thousands of postage stamps. First and foremost, the museum covers the general history of Canada’s postal heritage, including the social and economic role of the postal service in the country’s history. The museum also covers international postal topics.

The Postal Museum’s collections include a desk that belonged to Sandford Fleming, the artist of Canada’s first postage stamp, Canadian and foreign mailboxes and samples of postal employee uniforms, mailbags and rural mailboxes, post office signs and letter-sorting equipment.

The museum has a permanent exhibition, which is complemented by temporary or special exhibitions.

A notable exhibit is the National Postage Stamp Collection, which features every postage stamp ever issued in Canada.

In addition to these public displays, the museum’s mission includes collecting, preserving and describing tangible objects relating to Canada’s postal history.

History

The Canadian Postal Museum was established in 1971 and opened in 1974 as the National Postal Museum. It was merged with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1988, acquired its current name in 1996, and moved to its permanent location at the Museum of Civilization in 1997.

Department

The Postal Museum is operated by the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation, a federal government corporation (Crown Corporation), which is also responsible for the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Canadian War Museum, the Canadian Children’s Museum, and the Virtual Museum of New France.

Membership in organizations

The museum is a member of the following organizations:

• Canadian Museums Association (Canadian Museums Association),
• Canadian Heritage Information Network and the Virtual Museum of New France.
• The Virtual Museum of Canada.

Toronto also has a museum of Canadian postal services. It is located on Adelaide Street, in the First Toronto Post Office, which was founded in 1834, when Toronto (then York) was the capital of Upper Canada. The post office is still in operation here.

Another exhibit on Canadian postal history is located in the old post office building at the Oakville Museum in Oakville, Ontario.

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The Royal British Columbia Museum includes three permanent galleries: Natural History, Becoming BC and First Peoples Gallery. The museum’s collections comprise approximately 7 million objects, including natural history specimens, artifacts and archival records. The natural history collections contain 750,000 specimen records almost exclusively from British Columbia and neighboring states, provinces or territories. The collections are divided into eight disciplines: entomology, botany, paleontology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, herpetology, mammalogy and ornithology. The museum also hosts traveling exhibitions. Previous exhibitions have included artifacts related to the Titanic , Leonardo da Vinci , Egyptian artifacts , Vikings , British Columbia Gold Rush and Genghis Khan . The Royal British Columbia Museum partners with and hosts the IMAX Victoria Theater , which shows educational films as well as commercial entertainment.

The museum is located next to Victoria’s inner harbor, between the Empress Hotel and the Legislative Assembly Buildings . Near the museum is the Cultural Precinct of the Royal British Columbia Museum, a neighborhood of historic sites and monuments, including Thunderbird Park . The museum also hosts traveling exhibitions around the province of British Columbia as well as international exhibitions Guangzhou, China .

On March 26, 2012, Jack Lohman was appointed CEO of the Royal British Columbia Museum. Various groups help in the development, success and maintenance of the Royal BC Museum. These include volunteers, who number more than 500 and are 4 times the staff of the Royal BC Museum; The Royal BC Museum Foundation (formerly Friends of the Royal BC Museum), a non-profit organization established in 1970 to financially support the Royal BC Museum and facilitate its work by building relationships within the community; Security Services, responsible for risk management, emergency response, security services and continuity of bi

The Royal BC Museum is the perfect place for a family vacation. The Provincial Royal Museum was founded back in 1886. The size of the collection is over 7 million pieces! The royal title was given to the museum by Queen Elizabeth II herself.

The scientific disciplines of paleontology, entomology, ornithology, zoology, ichthyology and botany are actively developed at the museum. The museum’s exhibits include numerous archives, natural fossils, historical items, and other artifacts. For example, visitors to the museum can familiarize themselves with a 55,000-year-old collection of fossils that are several million years old.

Recently, the museum has begun to pay much attention to modern problems of mankind, especially climate change on the planet. Various interactive events are organized here: master classes, lectures, excursions, and even government courses.

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History

The Kingston Maritime Museum was incorporated by letters patent on August 29, 1975 for the purpose of collecting, preserving and displaying artifacts related to Great Lakes maritime history, shipping and shipbuilding, constructing an exhibition area for special exhibitions of both maritime and non-maritime related exhibits, encouraging public participation in the study of maritime history, developing a maritime resource center of archival materials, books, publications, ephemera and objects so that the public, students, researchers and historians can prorate and study the history of the Great Lakes, and developing a maritime resource center of archival materials, books, publications, ephemera and objects so that the public, students, researchers and historians can study the history of the Great Lakes.

The museum in 1892 was originally located at the Kingston Dry Dock, a National Historic Site in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It should not be mistaken for the Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard, which was a British naval base and home to the then-provincial Marines.

Once an important site for building and repairing ships on the Great Lakes, the Kingston dry dock was built in 1890 by the federal government of Canada during Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s tour of the province. Opened in 1892 by the Department of Public Works as a repair facility for ships navigating the lakes, the dry dock served dry cargo ships and ships below the waterline.

Sir John A. Macdonald laid the cornerstone of Kingston’s dry dock in 1890.

Macdonald would live long enough to see the realization of his $344,276 project, which would later fall to accusations of political patronage after the Canadian election of March 5, 1891. Because he suffered a series of strokes in 1891, one of which proved fatal on June 6 of that year, he would never have the opportunity to see the dock opened and begin operations.

The original 85.3-meter limestone dry dock was lengthened to 115.2 meters of concrete and leased to the Kingston Shipbuilding Company in 1910; private companies would operate it until 1968. During World War II, warships, particularly corvettes, were built at this dry dock.

The dock site consists of a main building built in 1891 of solid limestone that houses the dry dock pumps and engines, an additional building constructed in 1915, and a small freestanding building completed in 1938. The dock’s distinctive square stone chimney is 90 feet taller than the city’s urban waterfront. As of 2014, the federal government still owns the dry dock, buildings, and pier; it plans to relinquish its ownership, which could leave the museum without a location after 2015.

Facilities and Collection

As of 2012, the museum consists of seven galleries. The temporary gallery shows changing exhibits (such as an exhibit of Kingston warships 1812-1814 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812). The six permanent galleries include the Donald Page Gallery, which includes several exhibits including the Great Lakes Sailing Era, the lives of sailors, and the evolution of ships of the years. The room where it is housed used to be an air compressor room and tool room at the dock. In the newest gallery, the so-called Eco-Gallery, visitors can learn about global issues such as pollution, water diversion and conservation, invasive species associated with the Great Lakes. The Shipwreck Gallery tells the history of shipbuilding and maritime disasters, from the early days of wooden ships to the construction of modern liners. This room was called the dynamo room at the dock. The Kelvin Gallery shows Garden Island, where the Kelvin family was involved in shipbuilding and lumbering, and also tells of Kingston’s maritime past. The dock’s boiler room used to be located here. The Pump Room tells the story of the complexity of operating a dry dock for shipbuilding. The pumps and engines in this room were used to drain the dry dock and raise the dock caisson gates.

Kingston’s dry dock buildings were converted to a year-round museum in the 1970s; CCGS Alexander Henry was decommissioned in 1985 and put on display in front of the dock in 1986 as a ship museum.

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The building

The building was erected on the site of a former farm owned by a merchant of Scottish descent, William Stewart. The area was known as Stewarton. The construction of residential buildings in Stewarton began in the 1870s. In 1905, the government purchased the land to construct a building as an architectural addition to the Parliament of Canada at the opposite end of Metcalfe Street. The “Scottish Baronial” style building, which was designed by David Ewart, cost 1.25 million Canadian dollars to construct. The building housed offices belonging to both the Senate and the House of Commons.

Because the building was located on unstable clay soil, the tall tower that crowned the building had to be demolished in 1915.

After the Parliament fire and until 1922, it housed the House of Commons and some offices of the Government of Canada.

In 1968, the building’s National Museum of Canada was divided into the Canadian Museum of Nature and the National Museum of Man (later renamed the Canadian Museum of Civilization), although both remained in the same building. In 1989, the Museum of Civilization moved to a new building in Gatineau, and since that time the Museum of Nature has occupied the entire building. In 1990, the building was designated a National Historic Site of Canada.

Between 2004 and 2010, the building underwent a major renovation, during which a large glass hood was installed in place of the tower that had been removed in 1915.

Exposition

In the basement of the museum there is a Solarium (greenhouse) with flying lizards, a presentation laboratory and a three-dimensional movie theater.

The first floor houses the cafeteria (east wing), the Rotunda (south ledge, for short-term exhibitions and celebrations) and the Fossil Gallery (west wing, from Late Cretaceous to Eocene).

On the second floor are the Water Gallery (east wing), the Rotunda Mezzanine (south ledge, for short-term exhibitions), the Mammals of Canada Gallery (west wing), and the Royal Lanterna (site at the base of the Glass Tower).

On the third floor are the Mineral Gallery (east wing), the Salon (south ledge, rented out for holidays) and the Exhibition Hall (west wing). Notable exhibitions:

• 2010-2011: “Antarctica”
• 2011: “Extreme Mammals”.
• 2012 (March – September): “Unpunished Death” (paintings by Ellen Gregory)
• 2012 (September) – 2013 (May): “Unbridled Nature” (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes – in collaboration with the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, USA)

On the fourth floor is the exhibition hall (east wing). Notable exhibitions:

• 2012 (March-September): “Tohora Whales” (an exhibition about cetaceans at Te Papa Tongarewa Museum Auckland, New Zealand)
• 2014: Luminous Natural Objects

In between exhibitions, the wing is rented out for events. There is a bird gallery (west wing), including a children’s play area and Animalium (insects, spiders, some amphibians) and exhibition hall in the west wing

A number of rooms of the museum can be rented by organizations and individuals as halls for celebrations and conferences. These include the Rotunda (1st and 2nd floor, south end, where the Parliament of Canada was located in the early 20th century), the Glass Tower (2nd and 3rd floors, north end), the Salon (3rd floor, south end), and the exhibition rooms on the 3rd and 4th floors (when not occupied by exhibitions).

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