American Museum of Natural History | Diana Staresinic-Deane

I learned about the new Museum at Prairiefire completely by accident: I happened to catch a discussion on a friend’s facebook page about places to visit in Overland Park, and someone mentioned a new museum opening in May.

Museum at Prairiefire.

The museum is part of a larger development called Prairiefire, which has created an upscale small-town village of arts-and-crafts-inspired apartment buildings, a shopping area, a cinema, and the museum, all within walking distance of each other. The museum building itself is gorgeous and is surrounded by a wetlands park filled with native plants.

The museum includes a Great Hall (free to explore), an American Museum of Natural History exhibit (admission fee required) and a Discovery Room for children (admission fee required). During our visit, the Great Hall was filled with dinosaur and fish fossils.

The big reason to go during the next few days is the AMNH exhibit, Water: H20 = Life. Originally on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, it is now a wonderful traveling exhibit. It’s beautiful, it appeals to the senses with a combination of live animals and plants, text, sound, hands-on demonstrations, videos, and technology. We noticed that even younger children were taking their time exploring the exhibit, and we were amazed by how much we learned about human, plant, and animal water needs and usage. Jim and I were especially enamored with a short film about the availability of fresh water on the planet, which used multiple projectors to create a three-dimensional globe in the center of the viewing area.