I took the girls to the art museum yesterday after school. I used to take Maia a lot when she was still a sling baby/toddler but we haven’t been in a long time and it’s all new to her. I was inspired to take her again by MaryAnn Kohl’s latest BN.com article: Exploring the Art Museum: Making the Most of Your Child’s First Visit.
Our art museum is tiny, and the website only contains about three images, so I wasn’t able to follow MaryAnn’s advice of looking at the website with Maia ahead of time to find artworks to look for. Nor was I able to do the scavenger hunt idea that Rachelle Doorley suggested. At first this just made me miss Boston and the MFA, but once we got to the museum and explored we really had a good time. Maia wanted to find all the birds in the paintings and most of her energy went toward that (she counted 92 birds). We kept the visit short and went out for a gingerbread cookie afterward.
Do you have any favorite children’s books about art museums?
We’ve “read” Museum Trip by Barbara Lehman (it’s a wordless book), Museum ABC and Museum 123 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Babar’s Museum of Art by Laurent de Brunhoff. I’d say Museum Trip is our favorite of these, but I’d love to learn about some others.
