TROY >> For a 12th year in a row, families are able to take their children to a kid-friendly fun filled New Year’s Eve daytime celebration at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Children’s Museum of Science and Technology.
The child-focused “Noon Year’s Eve” event will feature a number of hands-on educational and fun activities for the kids to participate in. The museum located in Rensselaer Technology Park will host two noon year’s eve celebrations, one in the morning and one starting at noon Saturday. The first session will take place from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and then another session from noon until 2 p.m.
The two-hour sessions called for families to pre-register for free tickets ahead of time and museum officials said that both sessions were pretty much filled to capacity by Thursday afternoon.
“We are getting close to max capacity for both sessions, actually our morning session is at our max capacity of 250 people,” said Catherine Gilbert, the museum’s vice president.
During each session, museum visitors will be able to visit the animals of Operation W.I.L.D. at the Noon Year’s Eve animal show, create Noon Year’s Eve party hats and pinwheels for their celebration, take part in building and engineering challenges, and have their faces painted.
“New this year, we are actually going to have an instructor coming over from the YMCA to do yoga sessions,” said Gilbert. “So there is going to be a yoga session both in the morning and afternoon and it will be a kid’s yoga session, which is a nice, healthy way to start out the New Year for kids.”
Another new activity for this year will consist of kid’s being able to play normal tabletop games such as Jenga, but they will be playing a giant version of it, where they will be able to stack the blocks up for the game on the floor instead of on top of a table.
“We will have a whole room filled with different life-size games for the kids to play,” said Gilbert.
To end their session, the kids will be able to cap off the celebration with a SUNY Poly CMOST museum parade, leading up to the big countdown and bubble blowing bonanza to ring in the Noon Year.
The families that have pre-registered for the event were able to register for free, thanks to sponsors like GE and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The museum will not be able to allow people in to either session if you did not pre-register for the sessions ahead of time.
Attendees who did pre-register for either session are encouraged to contribute to the Museum’s Science for Every Child initiative, where for every $300 raised, SUNY Poly CMOST will provide a summer camp scholarship to a child in need.
“The pre-registration is really an important thing, because I know last year we did have some families show up the day of and we literally cannot allow them in for safety purposes since we want to know how many people are coming into the building without over doing it,” Gilbert emphasized during a phone interview Thursday afternoon.
Nicholas Buonanno can be reached at 290-3941.