Children can pretend to be a grown up in almost all aspects of life vie Pretend City Children's Museum in Irvine California.

An interconnected city allows children to "pretend" to be the adults. With an entire city at their fingertips, children can experience a variety of features every city has to offer. With over 15,000 sq. feet of interactive exhibits and activities, Pretend City Children´s Museum, located at 29 Hubble in Irvine, California, brings to life every profession, necessity and daily occurrences of a real city. What can your child do?

An amphitheater, nestled in a park setting will host storytellers, musical entertainers, and music and drama experiences geared towards young children. It includes a stage, a child-friendly sound and lighting panel, and audience seating. The area will be the place where children and families can act, create and perform their own songs, dances and stories. With the backdrop, music, prop boxes, and a variety of costumes, children can dance to their own beat, be the stars of their own plays, and give life to their wildest imaginings!

As colors ebb and flow with the brush strokes of children creating palettes of every color in the Art Studio. This distinct area in Pretend City is unlike any other in that it is definitely not about pretending. In this authentic art studio, children indeed are artists in their own right and get to take home their creations for all of the family to admire.

Banks serve as an important part of our lives and are an integral part of a healthy economy. Money management is a life-long process that begins in early childhood and thrives at our Pretend City Bank & ATM. After working at the Construction Site or Health Center, when children receive their "Pretend City paycheck", they will deposit it in a Pretend City ATM. Just like their parents do, children can then withdraw cash from the ATM to use at the Grocery Store, Gas Station or Café. Since the brain learns by doing and practice makes permanent, children will begin to develop money smart skills that will help them to understand and use the concept of working for money and using it wisely to make purchases. Just as in any community, children at Pretend City will have many opportunities throughout the museum to earn, save, spend, and give money.

One of the most popular places in the city is the café. Role-play opportunities abound in an area rich with pretend menus, ovens, stoves, and a variety of pretend foods just waiting to be prepared and served up to eager parents and grandparents.

Imagine children experiencing physics, geometry, and math all while playing! Our Construction Site includes a challenging pipe building activity and wooden planks for building structures large and small. The Pretend City Construction Site will undoubtedly be a bustling hub of fun for builders young and old!

For so many children today, the sound of an ambulance or fire truck means only that someone needs help. In Pretend City, children will experience first hand what really happens in an emergency as they pretend to be firefighters, dispatch operators, and police officers. When 911 calls are received at the dispatch desk, the calls will be routed to the fire and police stations, where children will zoom to the rescue in a child-size police car or fire truck. They can jump into action and save the day, hooking up their hose to the hydrant to fight blazing fires or rushing to help someone at the scene of a fender-bender. Then back to the firehouse and police station they will go, to prepare for the next emergency.

Our Pretend City Farm allows children to reconnect with nature and to see how food is grown, harvested and prepared for family meals. Children get a direct experience with the origin of the foods they eat. As Pretend City farmers, children can harvest crops and observe the life cycle of a chicken while watching chickens grow and hatch in the incubator. They can even pick oranges and deliver them to market!

Washing windows, pumping gas, checking tires, these activities and more will engage children and grown-ups alike at our Pretend City Gas Station. And how much per gallon did you say the price of gasoline was today? Children will find out first hand as they use the money they´ve earned working in Pretend City to fill up their own gas tanks!

Childhood obesity is one of the most pressing problems facing Orange County families today. Where better for children to really learn about good eating habits than in the Pretend City Grocery Store! Children will have fun shopping for five fruits and vegetables a day with their Pretend City grocery lists made up of foods from the California State Five-a-Day Nutrition Initiative. In addition, children will learn and use the red light, yellow light and green light foods system for making healthy food choices. Children working in the Pretend City Farm will deliver the healthy crops they pick to the Grocery Store and learn by participating in the farm to table food cycle.

Children are often reluctant to enter an exam room or a doctor´s office. At Pretend City, children will get the opportunity to experience the doctor´s office from an entirely different perspective as one of curiosity and excitement! Through pretend play in the Pretend City Health Center, children´s fears of medical personnel, procedures and equipment are reduced and their curiosity ignited about how their bodies work!

Any day in Pretend City is a great day for sailing! Children will make their own sailboats and use a series of wind and water machines to sail them in the Pretend City Marina. Using wind and water for power, children will race their boats and chart unique sailing courses through the waters of Pretend City´s Newport to Dana Point marinas. In another area of the Marina they can fish for the catch of the day, which they can wrap up at the fish stand to take to the grocery store to sell.

At the Post Office, children will have fun as they contribute to sorting, categorizing and reasoning skill-building. In Pretend City, parents and children will pick up mail from around town, sort it and deliver it. At a special Post Office table, children can also mail postcards home to themselves so that they can actively engage in a real-life experience of mail moving from one place to another.

Although the information above was taken from their website, www.pretendcity.org you can also listen to my podcast interview on February 12, 2010 at www.blogtalkradio.com on my show Whirl With Merle