Struggling to Entertain Kids at Home? These Art-Filled Online Classes, Tours, Coloring Books, and Quizzes Will Keep Them Busy

How many of your recent
“business” lunches have been mac-n-cheese with a side of
yogurt?  

Over the past few weeks, parents
and caregivers across the country have been tasked with the highly
complicated job of working from home, while keeping kids home from
school and childcare. As the weeks roll on, filling hours upon
hours with activities—and making sure remote learning happens—may
seem increasingly daunting, all while somehow managing to meet work
obligations and… stay sane. 

If that seems all too familiar
to you, we’ve put together
our at-home guide to classes, museum tours, quizzes and games to
help keep your young officemates occupied. 

 Art Classes, Streaming
Daily 

Break out the color pencils and
a juice box for a kid-friendly sip-n-sketch. Some heroic grownups
are keeping the right side of young minds busy with daily
streamable classes. Every week day at lunchtime art illustrator Mo
Willems will be hosting Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems, inviting kids on a
virtual visit to his studio at his residency at the Kennedy Center
to draw along with him at 1 p.m. (EST), and streamable
later. 

Meanwhile, Cassie Stephens, an art teacher at Johnson
Elementary School in Franklin, Tennessee, is using social media
platforms to host daily half-hour arts-and-crafts sessions. More
than 30,000 people tuned in to stream her recent robot-drawing
lesson. Stephens, who’s been teaching art for 21 years told
Good Morning
America that she’s hosting the classes to keep kids in
a routine.” I want them to experience art for normalcy. We are all
scared, and confused,” said Stephens. Art classes with
Cassie Stephens can be watched on weekdays from noon
to 12:30 p.m. (EST)
on Facebook Live and Instagram. Stephens also has a series of classes on
Youtube to be streamed
anytime.  

Kid-Friendly (and Led) Museum
Tours 

Many
of the world’s leading museums have been streaming lessons and
activities geared towards kids for years—and now that museum doors
are currently closed, what better way to stay in touch with our
favorite cultural institutions? MetKids
has a series of delightful
child-led interviews of artists and museum
professionals—including an interview with a
Met security officer who lets everyone know why
touching the art is a no-no. Over at MoMA, kids can take themselves on their own at-home
tour of some of the museum’s permanent collection highlights with
this kid-friendly virtual guide and audio
tour or take up some art activities inspired by works in the collection.

Museum Collection Coloring Books
and Contemporary Art Quizzes 

Running out of puzzles? Luckily,
institutions around the world are offering downloadable PDF
coloring pages through the #ColorOurCollections
initiative, which includes hundreds of participating
institutions. Kids can
learn how to create work like
Vincent Van Gogh (and
hear age-appropriate details of his life) with the Vincent Van Gogh
Museum in Amsterdam, or color metropolitan street grids thanks
to the New York Public
Library. Be sure to
check out the University of
Minnesota pages, which offer a mythical menagerie of
unicorns, sea lions, dragons, and other beasts culled from its
library collection and waiting to be colored. Check out the
full list of
participants here.

Coloring is known to calm the
nerves of children and adults alike—something we could all use in
isolation. Now, thanks to RxArt, a non-profit that commissions
contemporary artists to create site-specific installations in
pediatric hospitals across the country, we can take up the activity
with the company of leading contemporary artists through
#ColoringFromHome—a series of daily 4 p.m. coloring sessions on
Instagram Live featuring artists including Rashid Johnson, Susumu
Kamijo, and Jeffrey Gibson, who will be completing pages from the
artist-designed RxArt Coloring
Book (pages are
downloadable here). Oh, and Pictures Generation enthusiasts, MoMA
has announced a Louise Lawler coloring book available on
its website, too. 

If quizzes and games are more
your family’s speed, pop over to the Tate where kids can take such playful quizzes as
“Which Arty Hairstyle Should
You Get?” or “Which Art Animal Art
You?” The Getty also hosts its own series of online collection-based memory
games and even teaches “knucklebones,” a game
played by children in ancient Greece.

Craft Projects from the
Collections 

By now we’ve all heard that
Shakespeare wrote both King Lear and Macbeth
while under quarantine, but it’s a little harder to fulfill one’s
creative genius with kids running around the house. Now, the whole
family can get started on their own magnum opus thanks to the
art-historically aimed craft and art projects offered by museums
around the world. MetKids is a trove of streamable videos that can
teach you to fold an origami
Samurai Helmet or make
a photogram.

Ever dreamed your child would
make their own playdough—and then use it to build
Brutalist-inspired architectural
models? If so, head to
the Tate, where craft videos also come with
helpful time-estimates to completion.  

For a weekly routine, the
Children’s Museum of Manhattan has launched Artsy Thursdays (and
a full week of other at-home activities) where kids can
learn different mediums—the first edition taught the basics of
weaving. Likewise, the
blog for the Children’s Museum of the Arts is
another great source for inspiration with daily drawing
challenges inspired by different contemporary artists every
week.

The Great Outdoors (from
Indoors)

For those of us living in
cities, it might be a long while yet before the kids can get back
out exploring the natural wonders of the world. Luckily, museums
are stepping up to keep kids’ minds out of doors. The
American Museum of Natural
History’s OLogy science website is full of fun activities, games, and streaming
conversations about the natural world. And though we’re inside,
spring is in full swing. Through the Smithsonian National Museum
Natural History, in Washington, DC, kids can take a virtual walk
through the museum’s beloved Butterfly
Pavilion, and learn more about these species with
more than 20,000 varieties. Meanwhile, the Natural History Museums of Los
Angeles County have put together a set of virtual nature walks to minds out of doors—as well as some craft
projects, including a “Make-Your-Own Fossil Skull
Puppet.”

Art-Historical TV
Time

Screen time may be the savior of
many parents in the coming weeks, but if you’d like to add a dash
of arts and culture to the entertainment we have a few
recommendations.

A classic among classics, the
hour-long extravaganza “Don’t Eat the
Pictures” (1983) is an
exploratory romp through the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the
Sesame Street characters (and takes its name from an
unmissable Cookie Monster song). It’s sure to be enjoyed by kids
and child-at-heart adults alike.  

For kids aged about 3 to 5 year
old, the PBS cartoon Peg + Cat is an animated tale of a
girl and her cat—while the show emphasizes math skills, the subject
matter is often cultural, with episodes devoted to art museums (and
guards), Cleopatra, and the ballet dancer Misty
Copeland. For the
slightly older, 4-to-7 crowd, PBS’s Xavier Riddle & The Secret
Museum is the
animated adventures of a boy named Xavier, his sister, Yadina, and
their friend, Brad, who time travel to meet historical figures,
including the likes of Leonardo da
Vinci. Everyone’s
favorite rambunctious storybook red-head Madeline also starred in
an animated series that centered around trips to Versailles, the
Louvre, and even on
an archeological
dig.

For feature-length films,
the Night at the Museum, a now-classic trip through the American
Museum of Natural History, is good for older kids as well,
while The Secret of
the Kells is a
magical adventure tied to the art of calligraphy. If there are any
budding archeologists in your brood, The Prince of
Egypt (1998) is an
animated, musical journey that tells the story of Moses’s exodus
from Egypt—and does so in a way that’s remarkably accurate and
informative about the era. And for a classic twist,
the 1966 comedy
How to Steal a
Million, starring
Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, is good for the whole family.
Centering around a duplicitous art collector, his disapproving
daughter, and a charming would-be thief, the movie is replete is
with faux Van Goghs and a knock-off Venus to boot.

The post Struggling to Entertain Kids at Home? These
Art-Filled Online Classes, Tours, Coloring Books, and Quizzes Will
Keep Them Busy appeared first on artnet News.