Our son Aaron (now a teenager) was born in Lee County, and before he had even started school, we began an educational tour of the county’s educational kids’ attractions, with trips to the Imaginarium Hands-On Museum & Aquarium and the boardwalk nature trail at Six Mile Slough, among others.
With his first-grade Tiger Cubs den, we visited Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium to pet snakes and hike trails. His fourth-grade history project took our family to the Southwest Florida Museum of History in downtown Fort Myers to research local cow hunting legend Jake Summerlin and the Cracker lifestyle. In fifth grade, I chaperoned Aaron’s class on a tour of Ostego Bay Marine Science Center in Fort Myers Beach.
Between the area’s city streets and nature paths, Aaron gained lots of firsthand, hands-on wisdom.
Adventures
For urban sophistication in neighborly, kid-favorable settings, we head to Fort Myers and its sister city across the bridge, Cape Coral. As a toddler, Aaron got his first lesson on weather when he walked through a thunderstorm and sat through a hurricane at the Imaginarium. And stayed perfectly dry!
In the history department, we toured the Cracker House at the Southwest Florida Museum of History and learned that the term “cracker" referred to the snap of cow hunters' whips and that tin roofs reflected the sun’s heat to keep homes cool. Electricity surges through lessons at the Edison & Ford Winter Estates, where tours offer insights into the lives of two geniuses who lived side-by-side. Aaron’s favorite lessons: Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, and Henry Ford used local Spanish moss to stuff his early car seats.
Downtown Fort Myers’ renovated circa-1908 Arcade Theater provides a pint-size measure of cultural stimulation and theater savvy with its Saturday Lunch Box Theatre during March and April. The Broadway Palm Dinner Theater entertains the family with such classics as “Hans Brinker” and matinee buffets loaded with kid delicacies.
Nature Quests
Decaying mangrove leaves are the baby food of the estuary. The sea robin – a fish with fins, spikes, legs and even wings – looks like some kind of weird animal experiment gone awry. And blue crabs have an internal “pause button" they push when they’re stressed out. These were a few of the lessons we learned aboard an eco-tour in Fort Myers Beach as the naturalist handed around an odd assortment of creatures he had pulled from the floor of Estero Bay Aquatic Preserve.
Tidbits of information we’ve gleaned on our nature quest across Lee County:
On Sanibel Island, we learned that barnacles eat with their toes, gopher tortoises munch at the turtle grass “salad bar" and scallops have 100 eyes. (Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation Beach Walk & Talk, seasonal)
Snakes have smooth and silky – not slimy! – skin. You should always pet a snake in a head-to-tail direction. (Calusa Nature Center & Planetarium)
Stone crab fishermen remove only the claws, which regenerate. A stone crab goes through four sets of claws in a lifetime. (Ostego Bay Marine Science Center)
