A Turtle’s Eye View

If you’re nervous about taking your child to a “real” museum for the first time, this is a great place to start. Heritage Sandy Springs is a small, extremely kid-friendly history museum with tours designed just for preschoolers.

On a recent Saturday, I took my 4-year-old son to a Turtle Tour, where toddlers and preschoolers participate in stories, singing, crafts, and nature and history lessons. Every month’s tour has a different theme based on Georgia’s history and culture.

During our visit, the theme was “Cool Tools.” We sat on the museum floor and sang along to nursery rhymes and finger plays, and looked at photos of tools. A couple of friendly faces helped our tour guide Ms. Pinckney (Sandy, the museum’s chipmunk mascot and his pal Spring, the turtle) to keep things on a kids’ level. We got to touch and see real tools and talk about how and why they’re used. The tour guide read aloud books related to the theme and we got book recommendations to extend the museum activities at home. Outdoors, we did a hands-on art project also related to our theme and every child got to take it home. 

We toured the exhibit halls, spending time looking at artifacts that show the history of the Sandy Springs area, and a special exhibit of wooden folk art by local artist Moses Robinson. He used lots of found objects, like peach pits and walnut shells, which made it fun to investigate what materials were used in creating his pieces. My son really started “putting it together” when he realized that the wood carvings were all made by someone with tools!

In the permanent exhibit space, we saw interpretive panels showing key points in Sandy Springs history, and how the area was impacted by major events like the Civil War. The whole tour lasted about 30 minutes; a perfect amount of time for little attention spans. So, why is the program called Turtle Tours? The Eastern Box Turtle is the mascot of Sandy Springs because the animal is local to the area and it’s known for having a long life. Jack Elrod, the writer and illustrator of the Mark Trail comic strip, lives in Sandy Springs and designed a public art exhibit of “town turtles” for the city in 2004.

– Ayanna Cato-Hawkins