Lifestyle
At SoCal newest children’s museum, kids can dig for mammoth bones or face a giant Lite-Brite
Talk to the passionate team behind KidSTREAM, a new children’s museum in Ventura County, and they’ll tell you about the many lofty goals they have for the 21,000-square-foot space which opened to the public Thursday.
They’ll describe how the museum is the first of its kind in Ventura County and how they hope to make it accessible to as many local children as possible through outreach, discounts and free programming.
They’ll explain how the immersive exhibits highlight the county’s unique industry and geography, including an agriculture area where young visitors can pick pretend fruits and sell them at a farmers market and an ocean exhibit where miniature replicas of the Channel Islands emerge from the bouncy blue “Pacific Ocean.”
A drone view of the museum’s Pacific Ocean and Channel Islands-themed play area.
Avery Hanchar, right, and her brothers Oliver and Carter, test their climbing and balancing skills.
They’ll share that the STREAM in KidSTREAM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Arts and Math, and talk about the activity carts and art projects that will enhance and support learning for young visitors.
But they are also well aware that for some families, the still-evolving space will serve a less highfalutin, if just as important, goal.
“Parents are looking for a good nap on the way home,” said KidSTREAM founder Kristie Akl. “And we can give them that too.”
Akl, along with KidSTREAM board chairman Bryan Yee and guest experience director Dani Hildreth, were giddy with excitement as they took me on a tour of the museum in the days before it opened.
This moment had been a long time coming, they said.
A high-energy former high school biology teacher with a make-it-happen spirit, Akl first began dreaming about a children’s museum in Ventura County in 2013 after taking her three daughters to KidSpace, a children’s museum in Pasadena founded by members of the Caltech community in 1979.
Akl loved Kidspace, but it was a full hour from the family’s house in Camarillo and she longed for something similar closer to home. For two years, she tried convincing others to create a children’s museum in Ventura County. When that failed, she formed a fledgling board in 2015 and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017.
A young guest chases a cloth blown out of the tubes at the museum’s Amazing Airways exhibit.
“I was always optimistic,” she said. “You have to be to do something like this.”
The original plan was to open the museum in 2020, but fundraising efforts were hampered by the 2017 Thomas fire, which destroyed hundreds of homes in the area. A few years later came COVID shutdowns. The delays were discouraging, but Akl and a growing community of motivated believers used the time to build out their proof of concept by bringing science projects to local schools, neighborhoods and community events, creating online workshops and giving farm workers free science kits to help their kids get exploring.
“It was a herculean task and a huge community effort,” Akl said. “Everyone leaned in.”
Today she estimates that the KidSTREAM Children’s Museum touched the lives of 70,000 children in the Ventura area before ever opening its doors.
Luke Delossantos, right, and his son Grayson play pretend.
“They prototyped a lot of ideas,” said Yee, a father of three who took over from Akl as chairman of the board of KidSTREAM in 2022. “That showed us what works and what doesn’t work and what we should do next.”
In 2022, the city of Camarillo donated the building that housed the former public library to the museum and in 2024, the team raised enough money to bring children’s museum specialist Hildreth on board. Construction began in 2025.
In addition to the agriculture and Pacific Ocean areas outside, visitors will find a camping exhibit with an obstacle course, gratitude tree and a series of different shaped tents where kids can play. There’s also a sand pit where children can dig up replicas of pygmy mammoth bones. (The pygmy mammoth is a dwarf species of mammoth that was native to the Channel Islands.) A nature area includes a sensory path designed with the unique needs of neurologically divergent children in mind.
“There are 200,000 kids in Ventura County from a huge range of backgrounds including a lot of farm worker families,” Hildreth said. “The space is designed for all of them, newborn to 10 years old.”
In addition to the outdoor play areas, visitors will find an indoor “makerspace” with a white Lego wall where children can create vertical designs, four tables for art projects and a super-sized Lite-Brite.
Visitors walk through a greenhouse at the museum’s agriculture area.
“When you are 3 feet tall, it’s your whole field of vision,” Hildreth said.
Admission to KidSTREAM is $16 for adults and children over the age of 1, $13 for seniors and military, and $3 for families with EBT, SNAP or WIC cards. Membership options are also available.
Yee said market research suggests the new museum will reach as many as 150,000 people, and there is still room for expansion.
“We’re 21,000 square feet now with room for growth,” he said. “We’re not stopping, but we’re so excited to open our doors.”
Xie Miao and Yang Enyou in The Furious.
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There have been some fantastic movies released this year, and we know you can’t see them all. So we’re recommending four recent movies we missed that you should add to your watchlist: The Furious, Tuner, She’s The He, and Heresy.
If you need a few more fun film recommendations, check out these episodes:
Fun movies you may have missed
Our favorite movies on Tubi
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A tarp covers the facade of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on June 13. A federal judge has asked the arts complex’s leadership to explain the purpose of the tarp and the surrounding scaffolding.
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Alex Wroblewski/AFP via Getty Images
On Wednesday, the federal judge overseeing the Kennedy Center lawsuit ordered the center to give him a status report on the center’s operation and programming within the next few weeks. Judge Christopher R. Cooper also said that the Kennedy Center must explain the purpose and status of the tarp and scaffolding that have been placed over the front of the arts complex, where until recently both President Trump and President John F. Kennedy’s names were both displayed.
In a directive issued last Tuesday, Judge Cooper had given Kennedy Center administrators three days to update him on the arts complex’s immediate plans regarding construction, programming and public access. Trump, who now serves as the center’s chairman, had announced July 5 as the date the venue would close for major renovations.
Last Friday, on Cooper’s due date, lawyers for the Kennedy Center filed a request asking for an extension. In that filing, Matt Floca, who was promoted as the center’s president and CEO in March, said that the Kennedy Center’s current management intends to present its board with “an array of options” for trustees to vote on at their next meeting on an unspecified date in mid-July.
According to Floca, the options are a complete closure for extensive renovations; a partial closure “enabling some continued public access and limited programming” while some renovations are undertaken; and “a highly limited series of phased closures to address only the center’s most serious infrastructure needs while scheduling and maintaining a full slate of programming.”
In his newest order, Cooper denied Floca’s request for an extension. And he mandated that the center file a status report within seven days of the center’s July board meeting or by July 31, whichever date is earliest. He also ruled that the report must “indicate the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding,” which were erected by workers over the center’s front signage in the early morning hours of June 13.
When asked for comment Wednesday, the Kennedy Center pointed back to the documents its legal team submitted to the court.
The tarp and scaffolding on the center’s front portico went up after the Kennedy Center’s administration slow-walked the court-mandated removal of President Trump’s name from the front of the center and from all digital materials, which was supposed to happen no later than June 12. Workers removed the lettering overnight into the following morning, hours after the federal court’s original deadline, and covered the center’s sign with a tarpaulin.
As of Monday, the sign remains hidden from the public.
Trump’s name was scrubbed from all of the Kennedy Center’s digital content on June 4, the same day an email order to do so was issued by the complex’s legal team; NPR obtained this memo the day it was sent out to Kennedy Center staff.
These court orders are part of the ongoing lawsuit filed by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, against President Trump and the board of the Kennedy Center. Earlier this year, Cooper ruled that Beatty, an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center board, must be allowed to participate in board meetings. NPR has asked Beatty if she plans to vote at the July board meeting, but did not receive an immediate response.
It would be very difficult for the Kennedy Center to revive a thriving programming lineup for the months ahead. Over the past year, many prominent artists canceled their planned appearances, citing the politicization of the venue. Most of the center’s programming staff have departed, either via layoffs or resignations. Unlike top administrators at other major performing arts venues around the country, Matt Floca has no experience in artistic direction, fundraising or arts administration; formerly, he was the center’s head of facilities, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in construction management.
Established artists who typically perform at the Kennedy Center generally have their touring schedules set at least a year in advance, if not multiple years ahead. In years past, the center has publicly announced its upcoming season in mid-spring for performances beginning in September and running through the following summer.
Currently, only a handful of outdoor free movie screenings of nostalgic favorites like The Princess Diaries and Clue appear on the center’s calendar of events, along with some participatory workshops for kids. In the past, the Kennedy Center presented over 2,000 arts and education events each year.
The center also recently became ensnarled in litigation with one of its longtime tenants and artistic partners. On June 12, the Washington National Opera, a company formerly in residence at the Kennedy Center, sued the complex for $17 million. It claims that the Kennedy Center had withheld “years’ worth of donor gifts, bequests and endowment funds” that had been intended specifically for the WNO.
Denis Novikov/Getty Images
I tend to romanticize summer. The movies and TV shows I grew up with made me think that the season was about adventure and big-time transformation.
I imagined myself building a tight-knit friend group and getting out of a pickle together, like in The Sandlot or Camp Nowhere. Or traveling across the world, say, to Greece, like Lena Kaligaris, a character in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, having a whirlwind summer romance and returning an entirely different person.
I’ve never actually had a summer like that.
Even when your expectations are more modest than mine, “so often, the summer just flies by, and we haven’t taken the picnics or gone for the day trip or whatever it was that we thought we were gonna do,” says happiness expert Gretchen Rubin.
Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and host of the podcast Happier With Gretchen Rubin, has been sharing ideas on social media about how to make the season more memorable and satisfying.
She walks through four exercises to help you get what you want — and more — out of the season. Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).
🍑 Give your summer a theme
Pick a single word or phrase that you want to embrace this season — something that captures the feeling you want to have over the next few months.
“My theme for the summer is ‘ketchup,’” Rubin says. “It has a kind of a summer feeling, because you think of putting ketchup on your burger.”
“It’s a metaphor,” she says. It means to look for “whatever I could add [this season] to make something elevated and more fun.”
Meanwhile, my theme word this summer is “juice.” I no longer think that I need to travel far or completely transform to have a delicious summer. I just need to take advantage of the abundance that the season offers: ripe peaches and tomatoes, juicy softball pitches and the opportunity to feel juicy in my body when I wear a bathing suit.
Print out our worksheet here, fill it out and stick it on your fridge to keep you accountable. Or take a screenshot and post it to Instagram (don’t forget to tag @NPRLifeKit!).
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🪣 Create a summer bucket list
What do you want to do this summer? On my bucket list: ride the Ferris wheel at a summer fair, have more barbecues at my parents’ house and see the sunrise at least once.
There might even be something you don’t necessarily want to do but have been trying to accomplish for a long time — like cleaning out the garage or learning how to swim.
“Some people love a long list with a lot of easy things to cross off,” Rubin says. “I’m a fan of that approach myself.”
But some people like a list with fewer goals that are more ambitious. If you take this path, just make those items realistic, she says. “It’s easy to get discouraged if you set the bar too high.”
🏁 Set a fun challenge
It could be fun to gamify a few of the items on your bucket list — or to come up with an entirely different kind of dare for yourself.
You might try 10 new taco joints this summer or read five romance novels. Or you might come up with a theme, like “Freaky Flavor Friday,” Rubin says. Every Friday, you go to a different ice cream shop and try a new and ambitious flavor.
A good challenge can make your summer feel more memorable, she says. “If you did ‘Freaky Flavor Friday’ all summer long, that would stand out in your mind. Years later, you’d be like, ‘That’s the summer I discovered creamed corn ice cream.’”
Two challenges I’m considering: taking a swim class and rewatching all the best Pixar movies.
🖼️ Take a “five-senses portrait”
Experience the summer through your five senses — then reflect on each one. What does summer look like, smell like, taste like, sound like and feel like?
“It’s one thing to look at photographs, but that’s very flat,” Rubin says. “A ‘five-senses portrait’ puts you back into that experience. It’s a creative, fun way to look back on summer and capture the memories that you’ve created.”
Do this exercise either for your whole summer or for a specific summer adventure, she says. Do it with yourself or with a group. You can journal about it, make a collage, draw a picture or simply have a conversation.
When I think of summer, here’s what comes to mind: the smell of smoke from a crackling outdoor fire and the taste of toasted marshmallows on a stick.
More summer-worthy goals from Life Kit
Learn how to swim. Knowing how to swim can help you have fun at the pool or beach this summer. But it could also save your life. Here are some tips to start swimming at any age.
Focus on rest and relaxation. In Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s book Sacred Rest, she outlines different kinds of rest you may be craving. From the mental to the physical, Dalton-Smith shares how to identify what kind of respite you need and how to embrace rest.
Get into running. Ready to kick-start a new running habit? Coach Martinus Evans breaks down a common misconception to get you into the mindset and offers quick tips on pace, form and more.
Declutter your home. Got piles of stuff you just can’t seem to get rid of? Professional organizer Star Hansen explains how to let go of unnecessary items and keep your home neat and tidy.
This episode was produced by Clare Marie Schneider. The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
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