Exploring With Dora
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For the first time ever, Dora, the popular Latina heroine of Nickelodeon’s award winning “Dora the Explorer,” is starring in her own museum exhibit. The yearlong interactive exhibit opened Saturday at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan.
“Dora has become an icon to preschoolers – her adventurous, helpful spirit and pride in her Hispanic culture have been embraced by kids around the world,” said Karen Driscoll, vice president of Nickelodeon marketing.
Like the hit television series, the exhibit aims to enhance children’s problem-solving, social, and cognitive skills, as well as their appreciation and awareness of Latino culture and language. They count and find lost objects in the “Number Pyramid,” catch animal calls with “Dora’s Sound Catcher,” and climb “Boots’ Tree House” (Boots, Dora’s best friend, is a fuzzy monkey with red boots). While in the “Rainforest Maze” they crawl through fallen logs and play hide-and-seek behind giant tree trunks. In Diego’s “Animal Rescue Center,” they weigh, feed, and nurse injured creatures. Building bridges over Crocodile Lake, they can even visit “Dora’s House.”
Designed so that children, their parents, caregivers, and other family members can enjoy the exhibit together, each of the six stops, from the “Number Pyramid” through “Dora’s House,” is accompanied by “parent text” in both Spanish and English. At “Boots’ Tree House,” Alexandria Diodonet, 5, said that her favorite part was the slide. She also seemed to enjoy shooting balls down the tree trunk’s plastic tube while two other 5-year-olds, Alexandra and Elizabeth, waited for the blue, yellow, and purple spheres to arrive on the ground. “Hey, Daddy, check it out,” Alexandria said, tossing one in.
At Crocodile Lake, another family explored two bridges. “He wants to conquer that hill,” remarked Ann Church, mother of Charlie, who grinned and pushed his 9-month-old frame up the incline of a red path. Clearly stimulated, Charlie couldn’t stop crawling. “We don’t have a lot of color in our house,” Ms. Church confided, explaining her younger son’s animation.
Nearby, Charlie’s big brother, Harry, 2, reconstruct 1234 1342 1313 1354ed a wall with blue foam bricks. “Don’t throw blocks at Dora,” said Ms. Church. “You apologize to Dora,” she insisted, while Harry guarded his construction and stared at a larger-than-life-sized Dora figure.
At “Dora’s House,” the exhibit’s final destination, 4-year-old Kayla Ocasio announced, “Everybody needs to come to the tea party.” “Sit down,” she directed a little girl. “So you want some juice?”
As 2-year-old Mirei, dressed in pink corduroy trousers, played in Dora’s kitchen, her babysitter explained, “She loves Dora; she loves to watch it every day.”
The museum shop sells Dora finger puppets ($4.95); plush toys such as “Teach Me Dora” ($24.95), who helps children with zipper, button, drawstring, and Velcro closures; bilingual, Spanish-only, and English Dora books ($3.50-$12.95); as well as rainforest-dwelling plush toys, such as the boa ($34.95) 2-year-old Ferdinand Stirling rushed to grab on a recent visit.
In anticipation of crowds, the museum has added special member hours from January through March. Also on offer are Spanish-language introductions to the exhibit, and in January, six special programs and performances focusing on international culture and customs will spotlight Dora’s Latino world. The first of these special events is “Dora’s New Year in the Rainforest,” a day of making animal masks based on the patterns and colors of chameleons, spider monkeys, and toucans scheduled for Sunday, January 2.
The Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the Tisch Building, 212 West 83rd St., between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave., 212-721-1223, www.cmom.org. Admission: $8 children (1 and over) and adults; $5 seniors; free for members.