Like you, we are so ready to welcome April’s warmer temperatures and the return of spring flowers! And we are equally excited for April’s annual focus on kids between the ages 0-5 and their families as the Month of the Young Child. This year, here at Port Discovery, we are celebrating the Month of the Young Child by highlighting our museum’s newest initiative designed around supporting character development among young children, their families, and communities.
Supported by a $2.5 million dollar 3-year grant the museum received through the Lilly Endowment’s Fostering Character Through Children’s Museums program, Port Discovery invites our visitors to join us in cultivating positive character traits—what we call our Character Playful Powers—and empowering kids with the confidence and excitement to both find and share joy and kindness in our world. By exploring the power of joy and kindness, as well as curiosity, collaboration and perseverance, Port Discovery seeks to provide families, educators, and communities with simple, practical ways of nurturing empathy and resilience in young children—all through our lens of playful learning.
Here’s a quick look at our Character Playful Powers in action:
Joy: Let’s Follow Our Smiles
Here at Port Discovery, we know joy can blossom and bloom through brief interactions between kids and our staff, between caregivers connecting, and even through quiet moments of individual play and discovery. We’re here for it! Our research-based approach to creating a museum-wide environment of playful learning has been shown to unleash creativity, curiosity, problem-solving, and yes—joy!
How we nurture it:
Joy connects people at a feeling level. Feeling joy is also our natural entry point for sharing joy. Throughout Port Discovery, we are here to create moments of silliness, humor, and celebration to strengthen bonds. Join a dance party in our Playhouse, create a symphony of sound in Wonders of Water, or take part in one of our Art Cove projects that invites kids and families to explore expressions of joy through a variety of artistic materials.
Kindness: Let’s Care for Each Other
Kindness begins early, often in small gestures—sharing a toy, comforting a friend, or helping a sibling. Research tells us that when children grow their ability to feel concern for others, they are also building their capacity for an essential component of growth and development: empathy.
How we nurture it:
Our staff are trained to engage with kids and families through simple daily acts of caring — sharing, helping, thanking, comforting—and model those interactions as guides to our museum experience. We also provide kids with opportunities to identify and model these key social-emotional skills. Join one of our Peake the Pup puppet performances in the museum and listen for questions that invite deeper thinking about what it means to a good friend and member of your community.
Curiosity: Let’s Find Out More
Curiosity drives children to ask questions, test ideas, and explore the unknown. It is the foundation of creativity and critical thinking. Sensory exploration also presents countless ways to discover and experience the world around us.
How we nurture it:
Can you build the tallest tower in our LEGO play space, Brick City? If it falls, how will you change your strategy to keep the tower upright? What spring garden creatures might you find when you sift through our soil bin? Where in the world are ships coming from when they arrive at Baltimore’s port? Here at Port Discovery, we welcome questions (especially the endless “why?”), and encourage kids to step into their own independence as they take action to better understand themselves and our world.
Collaboration: Let’s Play Together
We know from developmental research that gaining the confidence and social-emotional skills empowers kids to have more positive interactions and relationships. Collaboration teaches children how to listen, negotiate, share responsibility, and value others’ contributions. It’s also a great way to make a new friend!
How to nurture it:
Here at Port Discovery, you can work together in our Port exhibit to load and unload cargo ships, join a team of other cooks in Tiny’s Diner to serve your family a meal, or find a new friend to build with in Blocktopia. Our museum educators are also here to collaborate with both kids and caregivers in all kinds of programs and experiences from improv in the Playhouse to shared art projects in our Art Cove.
Perseverance: Let’s Try Again
A big part of perseverance—often called “grit”—is embracing mistakes as part of learning, and even having fun together. Perseverance at Port Discovery is not about always getting it right but pushing through even when things feel challenging or frustrating. Building up your capacity to persevere helps kids manage their emotions and persist when things feel hard, rather than tending to become overwhelmed.
How we nurture it:
You’ll often find our staff on the ground or high up in our Cloud space, encouraging kids as they climb to the top of our Sky Climber and decide whether to take a turn going down our three-story slide. We know how important patience, persistence and making the effort to persevere are—even more important the achieving your goal itself!
As we all lean in to building our Character Playful Powers, Port Discovery is also hard at work developing our new Joyful Steps exhibit, scheduled to open in Fall 2027! This will be a space that brings our Character Playful Powers to life with interactive installations, music, movement, dance, light, and sensory play opportunities.
We also want to say to our caregivers and families that supporting the development of our Character Playful Powers doesn’t end with a visit to Port Discovery. Remember, when you and your child:
- Play together, you’re nurturing joy.
- Listen deeply or share how you’re feeling, you’re modeling kindness and empathy.
- Explore questions together, you’re fueling curiosity.
- Tackle problems as a team, you’re teaching collaboration.
- Welcome mistakes as part of learning, you’re building perseverance.
During your visit to Port Discovery and back at home, small, consistent interactions are shaping children as they grow, learn, and develop. In the end, success isn’t just about what children know—it’s about who they are becoming. And by intentionally nurturing joy, kindness, curiosity, collaboration, and perseverance, we help them grow into people who not only thrive, but help others in our world thrive too.