A traditional museum has a special, almost hallowed, place in a community. It is entrusted by the community to serve as a repository for society's knowledge, culture, and history. In a very real way, a traditional museum preserves the past.

A children's museum is about the future. When our community makes the bold commitment to create this children's museum, we are opening our hands to hold and nurture our future: those future leaders, engineers, scientists, farmers, artists, teachers, and dreamers who are today's children. The Peoria PlayHouse will be a place of possibilities and promise, the very heart of our community.

The Peoria PlayHouse will be about children and learning - a family place where children and adults will learn about themselves, each other, and the world they live in through exploration, interaction, role play, and direct experience. Visitors of all ages will lean on and learn from one another's experience, talents, and expertise. The Peoria PlayHouse will present exhibits, activities, and programs that will provide opportunities for visitors to expand their learning, and link their existing knowledge with new experiences.

The Peoria PlayHouse will consider the whole child - with exhibits and programs to foster growth in physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and interpersonal skills. As children explore, create, and succeed, they will gain competence, and take their new strengths and sense of self into our community.

The Peoria PlayHouse will be a partner in the learning continuum - with informal teaching methods complementing more formal educational methods used in our schools. The Peoria PlayHouse will serve as a center of learning in this region by helping to interpret and extend the Illinois Learning Standards, in both early childhood and early elementary years.

The Peoria PlayHouse will not be just for children - adult visitors play a critical role in enhancing learning and play. Well-designed exhibits will invite adults to become active partners in the museum experience. Adults will encourage children when they encounter problems, make suggestions for new scripts or plans when the child has exhausted his repertoire, join the child as a farmer, scientist, or engineer, observe the child in play, and talk about what the child has done. Adult-child interaction enriches the experience for both and helps build strong emotional bonds.

The Peoria PlayHouse will break the museum mold - it will not be a place where people are engaged in quiet, careful contemplation. Rather, it will be bustling with the happy hum of learning, a place where children of all ethnicities, social groups, cultures, and religions will come together and learn from one another.

The Peoria PlayHouse will work with and for schools - encouraging ideas and influences to flow in both directions. It will be a place to learn and teach, to be surprised, and to understand. It will be comfortable, safe, fun and full of opportunity.

Perhaps most importantly, The Peoria PlayHouse will be a place that our community will be proud of because they helped to build it and its content; and they will all share the feeling that they have done the very best for their children.

Children's museums represent a community-wide investment in children.  Central Illinois parents and teachers have long expressed the need for a hands-on facility designed and constructed solely with the needs and interests of our youngest citizens in mind.  The Peoria PlayHouse will meet this need with an environment that piques the curiosity of children, ages birth to eight, and challenges them to learn and grow.

Further, Junior League research has shown that no facility in our area currently offers this type of educational experience for this age group, and that our community's younger population is not being sufficiently served.

This facility will complement current efforts in Illinois like Caterpillar's Destination Technology partnership with Peoria Public Schools District 150.  Like this project, a children's museum builds "leadership and teamwork skills, using hands-on, engaged learned activities in science, math and technology, and having fun."

Finally, The Peoria PlayHouse will provide the opportunity for children and families to learn about the things that make Peoria a special place to learn and grow.  This includes sharing the rich history that organizations like the Junior League and ADM have played in shaping our community.

Mary Sinker, education consultant for this project, states, "Children's museums should not seem to have dropped from the sky and landed in a community.  They must grow from the rich soil that shapes the lives of those who will visit the facility regularly.  They must be cut from the cloth of the community and be filled with the history and uniqueness of that area."