The new Eureka! galleries have been designed to provide interesting environments for the very youngest children to learn in while they play.

SoundGarden is a giant-sized secret space which includes a Leaf Cradle play area for babies as well as room for Butterfly Painting where children can finger-paint using touch-screen technology. Here children may also get their first peek at other non-human living things.

You're never too young to learn

They can also don hard hats and venture into the second gallery, Desert Discovery, to collect and transport soft rocks and boulders and build their own desert dwellings. There's also a special Oasis with a giant peek-a-boo palm under which babies can play safely. However, all of this has been designed with learning in mind. The museum hopes this 'desert' in the middle of Halifax will provide opportunities for exploration, observation, problem-solving, prediction, critical thinking, decision making and discussion.

Penny Sharman is the Early Years Learning Advisor at Eureka! She says: "What these new galleries offer is immersive, multi-sensory spaces. It's just for the under-fives and the great thing about them is there are no right answers, no definite outcomes. Every child can approach the galleries the way they want to. It's really about having fun and using your imagination, and discovering and exploring what's in there.

"With early years education it is recognised that children learn through play. Adults sometimes just dismiss play but in actual fact that's what children do, it's their work process and they are building on what they know. Whether it's physical or it's representational, - if they are drawing a picture, whatever it might be - they are making sense of the world around them."

Penny does not believe the experience provided by the new galleries will substitute for that provided by parents and carers: "Where the museum galleries are different from what you get at home is in their scale and their perspective. For example, in our SoundGarden - obvously you can experience a real garden at home, and that's vital, but what you get here is like stepping through the pages of your story book. When children first walk in they look a bit puzzled and mystified but then they go around the galleries and work it out for themselves. It's that scale and that sense of place which they may not have come across before which makes it that little bit different."

The museum's Early Years team works closely with parents to give them more confidence to get the best out of their children's environment. Penny believes that sometimes "adults have forgotten how to play."

One person who hasn't forgotten how to play is Millennium Commissioner Floella Benjamin. In February 2005 she received a prestigious BAFTA Lifetime Award for services to children's television. She says: "I was so pleased by all the affection that all my Playschool babies showed me that night. There were 800 people cheering and it's a lovely feeling when you dedicate your life to children."

Floella Benjamin: "If you can look at something through the eyes of a child it's fantastic."

Floella is in no doubt about how Play School, the TV programme with which she is still famously associated and the experiences to be found at Eureka! can enrich people's lives: "Children are like little sheets of blotting paper that absorb and soak up whatever you show them, and tell them, and do for them, and that's why it's so important because childhood lasts a lifetime, and whatever you give them at an early stage will stay with them for ever. Whatever happens they will always remember those early years, and that's why we have to nurture those early years and give them the best and Eureka! does that so well. It's a great place if you're a child, and if you were starved of all those wonderful experiences when you were a child, come here because as an adult the child in you comes out and the excitement you get is great.

"The whole way it's designed really fires up the imagination and gets those taste buds tingling with the sense of excitement and that's what I love about this place. Whoever has designed it has thought about the pulse. When I did children's programmes I used to think about the pulse of how you lift children, take them up to a crescendo and then gently bring them down again, not with a bump, but you gently bring them down and feel the rhythm and pulse of what you are doing. How you spoke, you waited for them to discover before you told them the answer - all those sort of things are so important to the child's imagination and communication because you allow them to think. You guide them through. I love communicating with young children."

Floella agrees that it is helpful for parents to have support: "When you expose people to knowledge you musn't do it in a higgledy-piggledy sort of way, it's got to be a logical way.That's the clever thing about a museum like this, it's very interactive, very hands-on, so, anything you do, you are going to get something from it."

"If you have people who understand what it's like to be a child - most pre-school children are seeing things for the first time - so you have to have it at their level, not at an adult level where you've become jaded and cynical and know what to expect. We have to discover how it would look through a child's eye."

She remembers a time when she went to look at some children looking at a film about rubbish collection which she had made for Playschool wand found herself learning a valuable lesson: "When I went to see the children at that school look at that film and heard what they had to say, I felt ashamed of myself. I said 'Floella, you're not thinking as a child,. You're not tuned in.' And that was the time when I discovered how important refuse collection was, how important every detail of the rubbish collection was...It's all those questions that we never really think about. If you can look at something through the eyes of a child it's fantastic."

Floella believes that investing in children is the best thing a country can do but this has to be built on solid foundations: "The big bad wolf could not blow down the house made of bricks because it was solid, and that's why I tell people I think of life as the story of the three little pigs."

It is hoped these new galleries at Eureka! will provide such a foundation for children in West Yorkshire and beyond.