Learning Through Play at Omaha Children’s Museum: My Wild Backyard

December 29th, 2025

For nearly five decades, the Omaha Children’s Museum has embraced a simple but powerful idea: children learn best through play. Since its founding in 1976, the museum has encouraged curiosity not through quiet observation, but through movement, imagination, and hands-on discovery.

What began as a small, traveling operation, educators hauling activities across Omaha in a station wagon, now lives inside a former Ford dealership downtown. The building has been transformed into a space where touching is encouraged, questions are welcomed, and exploration is the point.

The museum’s current exhibition, My Wild Backyard, invites children to experience nature from unexpected perspectives. Instead of observing wildlife from a distance, kids become part of it, crawling like voles beneath winter landscapes or leaping like squirrels preparing for fall.

Andrew Mattson, the museum’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications, says watching children inhabit those roles is part of the magic.

One of the things that sets My Wild Backyard apart is how it was made. Unlike traveling exhibits, it was designed and built entirely in-house. Natural materials like stained wood were chosen over bright paint, giving the space an organic, tactile feel that mirrors the outdoor world it represents. And while the exhibit will soon travel to another museum, its impact here is already clear.

Still, no single exhibition defines the Omaha Children’s Museum.

Its deeper story lives in memory and repetition. Parents return with their children, grandparents arrive with grandchildren, all recognizing pieces of a place that has grown alongside the city itself.

That sense of continuity shows up in details like the Zoo Land animals, four characters rescued from old department store play areas in the 1970s and 80s. Refurbished and installed at the museum more than a decade ago, they now connect generations through shared nostalgia.

The building itself reflects that evolution. Where cars once sat on showroom floors, children now explore science through motion and storytelling. There’s a Gravitron ball area, a carousel and train, a science theater filled with experiments and books, and an Imagination Playground where kids run banks, shops, and businesses, practicing adulthood through play.

Mattson describes the museum as a place without “no.”

It’s an environment built on trust, where creative freedom leads to what he calls “subversive learning,” moments when children make connections without realizing they’re doing so.

As the Omaha Children’s Museum approaches its 50th anniversary in 2026, its mission remains unchanged. Learning doesn’t always look orderly. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s chaotic. Often, it looks like joy echoing through a former car dealership.

And sometimes, that’s exactly how learning should feel.