ABSTRACT
The final phase of children's museum experience is that of 'making sense' – the way that the experiences in the museum are woven more closely into the child's broader concerns and engagements. This chapter explores the ways in which the children made sense of museum objects and built the things in museum into their understandings and views of the world. It begins with a practical look at children's learning in the museum as a socially-embedded process, one that is nevertheless often motivated by others. The chapter then suggests that the children's learning within the museum can be divided into two main forms: categorising and connecting. While most of children's learning conversations within the museum appear to be characterised by naming and describing, a smaller number lead on to deeper connections. Children's acts of naming animals in the museum often seemed to arise from the sheer pleasure of recognising a familiar and sometimes favourite animal.
