Pretend City The Childrens Museum Of Orange County

At Pretend City, we believe young children learn best through play, families are our children’s first and most important teachers, diversity enriches children’s lives, and play changes the world. Our vision is to ensure that each child is ready for school success by providing real-world learning experiences that children need to develop essential foundational learning skills.

Pretend City Children’s Museum believes young children build foundational skills through the power of play. Research shows that play is critical to the development of executive function, a set of foundational skills that are required for successfully navigating the world. These skills are built through experiences, starting in the first year of life. Pretend City Children’s Museum is a place for children to explore, experiment, play and foster creativity in a familiar and transferable learning environment. Through pretend play, the “city” environment is also designed to help children learn about the interconnectedness and diversity of the local community, understand the needs of others, and explore the wide array of potential professions to which one may aspire. Pretend City serves all cities in Orange County and is designed to serve children ages infant through 10 and their families.

In summary:
Children are born with an innate self-motivation to play. Self motivation is a more effective driver than external motivation in skill building. Pretend City is a compelling pretend play educational environment. The type of pretend play in which children innately engage in at Pretend City effectively builds executive function skills. The building of executive function is an essential precursor to developing academic and life skills and is the very foundation needed for higher-order thinking.

These abilities are the core of successfully navigating in the world today, but these executive function skills do not just develop by themselves. They are built over time through experiences, starting as early as the first year of life, with more complex skills building on the simpler skills that came before.

We are focused on being the best we can be and being the best place to work. In 2022 we articulated a "North Star" guest experience which ensures that all children who come to visit get the best developmental and quality experience:
Promote independence & creativity
Be welcoming & fun
Learn through play
Inspire personal connections
Maintain a safe environment

Our emphasis on being a welcoming place puts inclusion, equity and diversity at the core of our work. This means being an engaged member of the community, building relationships and working together on shared goals and projects. We distribute 10,000 free tickets to our nonprofit partners annually, focusing on underserved and culturally diverse communities and generously implement Museums for All. With 40 percent of the adults in OC born outside of the US, we celebrate that we live in one of the most diverse communities in the nation with our Developing and Discovering Diversity program. Each month’s programming is filled with celebrations of important holidays and events provided by more than thirty cultural partners. Two of our important learning spaces, the café and the family home, are featured elements of Pretend City’s Discovering and Developing Diversity program. “Residents” in the home are real Orange County residents and artifacts from their lives are placed in the home. Similarly, the café is sponsored by a real business and with each new “owner”, the learning space is redesigned to incorporate their food and cultural attributes. These learning spaces highlight both similarities and differences.

Pretend City focuses on two other areas of programming: early learning activities aligned to school readiness and activities focused on supporting special populations, particularly new parents, developmental assessments and neuro-diverse children. Our learning spaces each have learning goals associated with them and staff work to feature those goals throughout the day. We often adapt existing spaces or build new ones to address elevated needs in the community. Last year, in partnership with Be Well, we built a vehicle to resemble their crisis van for children to “drive” in the city. We anticipate this van elevating the mental health conversation even further and with mental health partners visiting regularly, more families will have access to this essential service.
Our programs like free Neurodivergent Family Night and Baby Steps have been regularly “sold out.” Partners consistently attend and report great satisfaction towards their mission. In 2024, we will double the offerings of these special programs. Given the tremendous interest in child development programming and our interest in supporting the next generation of practitioners, we are building practice partnerships with the Crean College of Allied and Behavioral Health. This new integrated strategy includes expanded services and programming for guests, professional development for Pretend City staff, and activities to support mild developmental delays that do not meet the threshold of government-funded intervention.

We are working towards both qualitative and quantitative outcomes and have restructured our organization to engage the participation of all staff. The leadership team meets weekly to review operational, programmatic and financial data. Our guest experience committee meets regularly to assess progress on our goals and North Star. Committee members discuss feedback from the ticket and floor staff, members, birthday party and field trips, and attendee surveys. This committee and the leadership team tackle challenges that face many children’s museums including child independence, field trip and member balancing and child safety, among the many topics of discussion. Bi-annual staff retreats and monthly staff development often tackle problem solving together, providing input into the large and small issues that impact the guest experience and the quality of our program.

Regarding program impact on community needs, our attendance numbers are one indication of our impact. Families believe there is value in coming to Pretend City, including coming for special programming. Since reopening post-Covid,we have been happily seeing 2019 attendance numbers and exceeded membership numbers. We effectively use all the information we have within our database and sales system, as well as through our conversations with guests and partners to assess our performance. We have clear goals and priorities and work hard to achieve them.

New and renewed partnerships with local nonprofit partners in 2023 make it possible for the breadth of services and resources available to Pretend City guests and members. Partners such as Providence Speech & Hearing and Thompson Autism Center (both a part of CHOC), UCI, the Orange County Regional Center who provide developmental screening and intervention services, and Chapman University which is integrating developmental and family services at Pretend City into their allied health graduate programs at Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences.

Initiatives currently requiring financial support include:
Programming -
Developmental Screenings
Neurodivergent Family Night
Baby Steps
Inclusion and Diversity
Mental Health and Wellness
Parent and Caregiver Resources

A Child's Experience & Staff Expertise-
Learning Spaces (Exhibits - 17 )
Socialization and Relationships
Quality Educators ("Pretendgineers and Brainbuilders)
School Field Trips - Title 1 Schools

Improve & Preserve our Facility -
Investments that keep the Pretend City safe, looking good, and well-maintained

Southern California

It is impossible to overestimate how important the early years are when it comes to developing our brains. - Dr. Jack Shonkoff, Director of Harvard's Center on the Developing Child

What We Are:
Pretend City Children’s Museum in Irvine is a child-sized city where children can explore, create, climb and immerse themselves in dramatic play, all while building their developing bodies and brains. It’s an intentional collection of recognizable businesses and civic spaces, each with learning objectives that support the key domains for school readiness: social competence, physical health and wellbeing, emotional maturity, communication skills and general knowledge, language and cognitive development. Because many parents and other caregivers are unaware of the importance of early childhood development and dramatic play, visiting Pretend City is a learning experience for them, too.

Why:
For years, researchers have shared data that investing in high-quality early childhood education is the best strategy to increase the number of children graduating from high school, pursuing a meaningful career, and maintaining steady employment. The State of California is unequivocally endorsing the importance of early learning with investments in Universal TK, early education teacher preparation, and mental and physical health supports, among many other strategies.

Surprisingly to many, in Orange County, merely 52% of children entering kindergarten are ready across all developmental domains, and this was pre-pandemic. Pretend City is intentional about our learning spaces impacting the needle on this statistic.

Pretend City’s 17 creative learning spaces encourage children of all abilities and from all socio-economic backgrounds to build school readiness skills such as small motor skills necessary for holding a pencil or working scissors; large motor skills for walking, skipping and climbing stairs, problem solving skills including organizing bricks to build a building, fitting groceries into a basket; executive function and emotional maturity engaged in by children sharing in dramatic play. Pretend City is unique because we embed physical growth and brain development in play, play that happens in familiar community settings with the people who most engage with young children, their caregivers and extended family.

Our Future:
It's a transformative time for Pretend City as we develop exciting plans to build a new Pretend City at the Great Park, Irvine. We’re modernizing and expanding our learning spaces such as the café, theater, bank, grocery store, package center, health center, and auto service center, and provide new ones like the pet center and imagination workshop. There will be more places for artistic creativity and performance, as well as thoughtful technology integration. Most significant, there will be an acre of outdoor space for families to connect with nature while developing a greater appreciation for biodiversity and sustainability.
Pretend City’s learning spaces are designed to celebrate the diversity of Orange County and California. In our existing museum we change quarterly the theme of the child-sized café to introduce visitors to a breadth of foods and culture. Similarly, we welcome a new family to “move” into our home and share their familial traditions and ways of living. In the new museum we’ll have not just a single-family home as in our current space; we’re designing apartment and studio homes to reflect a neighborhood.

Partnerships:
Since Pretend City’s rooted in the promotion of healthy child development, we’re a leading site in Orange County for the identification of learning delays and support for identified special needs. We promote developmental assessments with our guests and community partners serving at-risk young children and connect families with relevant resources that ensure delays are addressed early. We host special monthly programming for new parents and for families with children who are neurodiverse and connect them with appropriate community partners such as Providence Health, AAP, Be Well, Start Well, Help Me Grow, as well as the Regional Center of Orange County. Our vision is to grow on-site support for holistic child development.

Allied Health and Education Pipelines:
The shortage of allied health professionals available to support developmental delays and disabilities is well documented.

Pretend City will address the service provider shortage by partnering with educational organizations such as UCI Nursing, Chapman University’s Crean College of Health and Behavioral Sciences, Pacific Oaks College, and OCAEYC, training the pipeline of professionals including teachers, nurses, occupational, physical and language therapists. And, we’ll work with these same fields to have professionals work with young children and their caregivers in Pretend City’s natural, non-clinical setting. Additionally, it’s our vision that these professionals provide education and exercises for children with mild delays that don’t rise to the threshold for medial intervention, but still interfere with learning and self-esteem. They’ll also train Pretend City staff expanding their skills and introducing these professions to young people still planning their futures.

Early Childhood Hub Goals:
Pretend City already has a solid community of relationships and collaborates on many fronts in the greater early childhood community, but with Pretend City’s expansion at the Great Park, Irvine we’ll actually house early childhood thought leaders and service providers and training professionals who are building a foundation for children’s long-term success and wellbeing.
Co-location will demonstrate a more impactful service delivery model, including the integration of Museum membership into the therapy plan. The collective impact of this co-location will be integrated service delivery, clinical: non-clinical therapy, increased support for children and families by health professionals and Museum staff, de-stigmatization of delays, and a unified voice for early childhood development.

Service Reach:
Pretend City currently welcomes 220,000 guests annually. During the week, school buses and preschool carpools bring field trips of children from different neighborhoods across Orange County. On the weekends, the learning spaces are filled with extended families and friends traveling an hour or more from LA, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties to experience play together and avail themselves of parenting resources. Business consultant, Management Resources, projects that we will draw over 310,000 visitors annually at our new location, more centrally located to serve a greater diversity of families.

To learn more and /or visit Pretend City, please contact us! Ellen.pais@pretendcity.org or Sue.harrison@pretendcity.org