How we visit museums
My children (7 and 5) and I visit museums a lot - sometimes several times a week. It is not unusual for a visit to last five hours. I am usually ready to go home long before the children are! I hate seeing children in museums wandering around looking bored, or racing around like they’re in a playground, not noticing any of the amazing things around them.
Here’s how we do it.
We usually go with a small number of things that we really want to see. Like maybe one object or display each. At the British Museum this week we had only visited to see the Egyptian galleries, and I had chosen two cases in one room that I really wanted us to focus on. We never stick to this focus but it seems to stop us walking about aimlessly.
Museum notebooks. Each child has a school-style exercise book they can make notes in. Sometimes they don’t make any notes at all, other times they want to copy down every object label they can see.
Worksheets-ish. Sometimes, if I’m on Top Parenting Form, I make a worksheet for them to fill in. For example, at the Natural History Museum they can fill in a table with their favourite examples of amphibians, mammals, reptiles etc. At Kew Gardens they could write down the tallest tree they could find, or three plants with berries, etc. (At Kew I was thrilled with my worksheets, unbearably pleased with myself. The worksheets came home completely untouched.)
Sketch paper. I don’t know if the paper is important, but I started packing some quite nice thick paper and a number of sharpened pencils. The children can choose anything they like to sketch - or nothing at all. On our most recent visit they both sketched various objects in a single room for half an hour. My seven year old likes to label her sketches with dates and locations. They have independently decided to sketch the same thing on each visit to the British Museum so they can get better and better. On this particular visit my daughter copied a Greek tombstone complete with inscription and then asked to be taught Ancient Greek so she could read it herself.
We take a lot of snacks and take breaks whenever we need to. Museum fatigue is real! I would rather spend fifteen minutes in a museum and learn about one or two incredible objects, than a whole day of wandering around in an exhausted, overheated, overstimulated daze.
We go back again and again. There’s no point visiting a museum once. Of course, sometimes you have to - I once ran round the entire Uffizi Gallery because it was my only chance. I remember nothing except the running. Of course you will visit some museums only once, but your local museum (or museums, depending on where you live) is worth visiting over and over again. In fact of our ‘regular’ museums we generally visit the same small areas repeatedly, we don’t even try to ‘tick off’ a different section each time. I firmly believe that’s how things get properly absorbed and embedded in a young mind - and an older one.