It doesn’t look like much from downtown Dover’s East Blackwell Street. Just a big yellow wall next to a chicken restaurant. There’s a small museum sign, but you have a hard time finding the door until you see the big colorful mural around the corner. Then you realize that’s where the entrance is.

And no, Vincent Van Gogh did not sleep here — it just looks like he did. One of the attractions at the Community Children’s Museum is a life-size replica of the Dutch master’s painting of Bedroom in Arles, where he lived in the late 1880s.

Jody Marcus, Executive Director of this non-profit, says eight- to- ten-year olds are first shown a copy of the actual painting (here’s Wikipedia’s article on the work, with images of the three slightly different versions), and hear about Van Gogh’s use of color and texture.

Then everybody steps into the room, where kids sit on the furniture and run their hands on walls colored and textured to follow the painting. “They can touch it, not just see it,” she says. “We talk about how he uses that to create a feeling.”

Another exhibit is a replica of Friendship 7, the spacecraft in which John H. Glenn, Jr., became the first American to orbit the Earth, in 1962. The replica is full size — which is to say, pretty small. Kids climb inside, sit in the astronaut’s chair, and get an idea of how difficult it was for the first astronauts to hurtle into space sealed in tiny metal capsules.

There’s also a display where kids can generate electricity using wind or solar power. Another exhibit is Homes From Around the World, showing a family’s patio in the temperate plains of Colombia, the entrance to a house in the hot desert of northwestern India, and a hearth from a Swiss chalet in the cold Alps. It helps kids appreciate how climate impacts cultures and the places people build to live in, Marcus says.

There are also painting and sculpture workshops for children as young as toddlers, and exhibits of kids’ artwork like the current Many Colors of Islam, with paintings by Indonesian children. 

The Museum also works with Downing Hospital Pediatric Art Program at Morristown Memorial Hospital, St. Barnabas and St. Clare’s.

It’s a nice place for an afternoon with your children, even if Van Gogh never made it to Dover.