A Game for Children to Play in Art Galleries
How many children have been and will be put off going to Art Galleries because they were forced to be bored in one (or more) by their parents? Stay for any length of time in an Art Gallery and you’ll see some poor child, bored stiff, traipsing around the paintings exhibited and wanting to leave. What parents should do is make the visit interesting and fun. Here’s how to do that for young children and get them to really engage with the Art.
Children love animals. They love horses, dogs, monkeys and most creatures. Ever since artists started to paint, from cave walls to canvasses, they have depicted animals. Next time you take a young child to an Art Gallery, tell them that they could help the Art Gallery out by counting the animals they see in the paintings. When they leave they can write down how many they have seen in the visitors’ comment book. This simple game will engage children with the Art. Even paintings which don’t have any animals depicted will be scanned to ascertain that fact.
If you don’t have the opportunity to take your children to an Art Gallery you could do something similar with online images of paintings. www.museumsyndicate.com offers a large range of paintings from international artists from all eras. Below are just a few paintings and some activities based on them.
Activities:
- Count the dogs in the pictures below
- Count the horses in the picture below
- Which is your favourite animal?
- Which dog would you like to own?
- Which horse looks the best runner?
- Choose one of the dogs or horses and copy it
- Draw a picture of your own or a friends dog, cat or horse
- See if you can find any paintings by George Stubbs on the internet
Image by unforth via Flickr
Image by Allie_Caulfield via Flickr
Image via Wikipedia
Image via Wikipedia
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3 Comments
AndAnotherThing, posted this comment on Dec 22nd, 2009
My daughter liked the shine on the fabric painted by Simone Martini but I thought that was unusual (a little weird even). Glad you liked the pictures but a vote would have been appreciated
Netty net, posted this comment on Dec 28th, 2009
How cool is this.
LewSethics, posted this comment on Dec 21st, 2009
nice pictures. When the kids start getting bored at the art museum we go look at medieval stuff.