Keeping young kids occupied this summer — without TV or video games

School is out, and maybe the kids are looking forward to two-and-a-half months of playing hide and seek — or, more likely, video games.

The Hands On Children’s Museum has other plans for them.

“There’s a lot of learning loss during the summer, and we are really trying to get kids engaged,” Patty Belmonte, the museum’s executive director, said in a phone interview. “We’d like to see the kids learning all the way through the summer.”

Of course, you don’t have to tell the kids that’s the idea behind the museum’s Summer Splash, which features such kid pleasers as performing dogs, superheroes and s’mores.

The museum speeds into its second annual Splash Saturday this weekend with the Fire Rescue Spectacular, presented with the Olympia Fire Department.

“They are not only bringing their entire fleet of trucks, they’re also bringing all of their safety equipment,” said Amy Brockman, the museum’s senior development manager. There’ll be police cruisers and a safety boat on hand as well, and kids are welcome to explore and climb into most of the vehicles.

The department also has created a Junior Firefighter Challenge, where kids can wield a hose (with help from a firefighter), join a bucket brigade and more.

“The course was designed by the firefighters as a sort of offshoot of what they experience when they are going through their own training,” Brockman said.

The challenge and the vehicles, along with mini ice cream cones the firefighters will hand out, are all free. The Waterfront Kiwanis Club will be selling hot dogs, Polish dogs and drinks, with all proceeds benefiting Hands On’s free and reduced-price admission program.

Inside the museum, kids can dress as firefighters in a photo booth, get their faces painted, and make fire hats and badges. In the Outdoor Discovery Center, they can ride on a mini fire truck driven by a firefighter.

Fire rescue-themed activities will continue until the end of the month, and then the museum will get ready for new adventures and new learning opportunities, including stunt shows in July and space exploration in August, inspired by the Aug. 21 lunar eclipse.

“We really want to keep things fresh,” Brockman said. “The intention is that we will have new and exciting themes each summer.”

So far, spreading the fun throughout the summer has been a successful strategy, Belmonte said.

“Last year was the first summer we did this format of a summer-long festival of fun,” she said. “We had 7,500 more visitors last summer than we had any previous summer.”

This story was originally published June 23, 2017 at 3:55 AM with the headline "Keeping young kids occupied this summer — without TV or video games."