Sock skating reopens at the Long Island Children's Museum

Snowflake Sock Skating brings the popular indoor “ice-skating” activity back to the Long Island Children’s Museum through Jan. 8 — with the addition of an indoor campfire pit where visitors can roast pretend s’mores, and the Frosty Café, where kids can sell imaginary hot cocoa from inside a 9-foot-tall snowman.

“It feels like the perfect thing to get people in the holiday mood,” Maureen Mangan, museum director of communications, says of the exhibit, which first launched as a test pop-up for several weeks last summer. Snowflake Sock Skating will likely return annually in the fall to mark the holiday season, she says.

The 800-square-foot rink — about the size of a four-car garage — features color disco-like displays and festive music and is cordoned off with candy-cane striped poles. The rink floor isn’t actually ice; it’s made from a high-tech synthetic polymer surface that lets users slide as if on a polished wood floor. No blades are needed — the museum instead offers disposable booties that visitors slip on right over their shoes in the beanbag chair area next to the rink. A perk of being indoors? “No running noses or cold hands,” Mangan says.

ROLE-PLAY OPPORTUNITIES

Ali Sachdev, 44, a creative director of design from Stewart Manor, and her husband, Greg, 47, who is self-employed, brought their daughter, India, 3, to sock skate recently. "We had literally the best time," Ali says. "All the kids were having so much fun. And the parents, too."

In the nearby Snowflake Village, fake money is traded as children sell laminated child or adult tickets to enter the skating rink. At the Frosty Café, kids serve hot cocoa using a toy cash register to make change. “We know how much kids like the idea of taking on different roles,” Mangan says.

A digital fireplace is surrounded by tree-stump-like chairs and children can roast fake marshmallows and use toy graham crackers and chocolate bars to make s’mores. Kids can pose for photos with their heads in the place of the heads of gingerbread men; they can make holiday music on a wall filled with jingle bells, triangles, tambourine, and xylophone.

SPIN, SKATE BACKWARD

“Are you ready to move your bodies?” Aimee Terzulli, museum director of education, asks a group of first graders as they put their booties on to enter the rink recently. She challenges them to spin and to skate backward.

“It’s slippery,” says Jacob Lobos, 6, of Westbury. Classmate Genesis Hernandez, 6, also of Westbury seems to enjoy falling on the “ice” as much as spinning and skating on it. Does it hurt to fall? “No,” she says.

The atmosphere is also inviting for parents, Terzulli says — she jokes that the museum staff wants to have their holiday party at the rink. To complement the exhibit, free craft activities are offered on specified days. From 1 to 3 p.m. on Dec. 10 and from noon to 2 p.m. on Dec. 24, make a beaded necklace and a decorated gingerbread friend; on from 1 to 3 p.m. on Dec. 11 and Jan. 8 make your own colorful construction paper skates.

Leslie O'Connor, 40, a program manager from Lindenhurst, says sock skating at the museum on a recent weekend was a new experience for her daughter, Lydia DeFrances, 2, who has never been ice skating. "It was funny watching my 2-year-old fall and shuffle," O'Connor says. "We had a blast."

By Beth Whitehouse

Special to NewsdayBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.