Eco Child’s Play

My girls and I are homeschooling a unit on art right now, inspired by the Artist Trading Cards they’ve been making and swapping with other kids around the country. We’ve been doing a lot of art in a lot of media, looking at a lot of art books and books about art from the library, and visiting some art museums within a reasonable drive from our home.

Two problems, however:

1. We live in Indiana, so we’re not exactly rife with art museums over here.

2. My girls are VERY young, and when we do visit an art museum, we’ve got an hour, tops, before we need to move on either to another activity or a double meltdown.

So how can a couple of little Indiana kids utilize an entire world’s offerings of art?

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We don’t do this often, or for a long period of time (Mean Momma allows only very limited media exposure), but we DO do this:

We visit art museums online.

If you can think of an art museum, it surely has an online presence, and not just with admission and hours information, but with real content–images, explanations, audio tours, you name it. My favorites, though, are the art museums that make a real effort to provide outreach to children through online activities and other content designed specifically for them. Here are the ones I visit most often:

• The Art Zone at the National Gallery of Art is the gold standard of children’s outreach, I think, with an online presence that includes hands-on activities that are fun and relevant to some pretty specific art genres. It hosts online activities that play with digital photography, abstract art, still life, and the Dutch masters, among other topics.
• CMA Kids at the Cleveland Museum of Art puts art into historical context with its section on Egyptian art–craft projects to do offline, online games and coloring pages, and explorations of the animals, life, and artifacts of Ancient Egypt.
• Museum Kids at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has, by far, the largest collection of children’s activities, ranging in age from the smallest kids, who can learn about color by digitally painting a hippo, to the most sophisticated, who might enjoy a multi-faceted timeline of world art history, illustrated by images from the museum’s collections.
• ArtJunction, an outreach program of the Art Education department at the University of Florida, is perhaps the most relevant for a homeschool approach, with suggested readings, ideas for teachers, online and offline activities for children, links to other web sites, and a whole section on my newest passion, ARTIST TRADING CARDS!!!
• The Seattle Art Museum School and Educator Programs are best suited for more mature students, with online activities on subjects like John Trumbull, Pacific Coast art, and Krishna, and even more slideshows, audio interviews, and other explorations of more sophisticated art subjects.

Do you find any online activities appropriate for your kiddos?

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