From https://lucicreative.com/future-exhibit-designers-5-fun-at-home-make-a-museum-activities-for-kids/
There’s so many fun things to do when you’re trapped at home. Making museum exhibits is a great way to keep the whole family busy together, and to incorporate art, science, geometry, and whimsical creativity into an activity. ….
Whether you’re a museum professional, exhibit designer, or simply a crafty stay-at-home caregiver, this is a great opportunity to teach children about how to create an exhibition. Let them know that being an exhibit designer is a blast! You get to draw things, learn about so many fascinating topics, and see thousands of cool objects.
Here are five super fun at-home make-a-museum activities for young children.
1. Create an Art Museum
Houses and apartments are littered with items hanging on walls. Paintings, posters, family photos, and school projects provide the perfect opportunity for turning your home into a curated art museum.
Make labels for the items on your walls or for interesting objects on shelves and tables. Include the artist’s name, artwork title, medium, and other bits of information. Your labels can be serious or silly, fascinating or fake. There are no rules! Have the child pretend to be a museum docent and give a guided tour of the galleries. If you want to take the project a few steps further, you can record a gallery talk, explaining the process of creating a specific piece of art.
Download an artwork label template – CLICK HERE
2. Build an Artifact Display Case
Your home is filled with personal treasures, such as gift store trinkets, jewelry, family heirlooms, and small toys. These special objects deserve to be highlighted in well-lit homemade artifact display cases.
Using something as simple and common as a cereal box, you can lay out, cut, fold, and tape your own display case. Cut a small hole at the top to provide “museum-quality” lighting from a flashlight or your phone. Once you’ve mastered making one case, make more and turn an entire room into an object gallery. Try changing the dimensions from the instructions below to create larger display cases from other cardboard boxes you have at home.
Download artifact display case instructions – CLICK HERE
3. Curate a Collection
Whether you’re four years old or forty, you probably have some sort of collection sitting on shelves or hiding in a box below your bed. Toy cars, shells, and action figures all work well for this project. You can also use objects you find around the house or in the yard, like a box of crayons, pine cones, or silverware.
Come up with an interesting way to organize your collection: by size, color, or shape, for example. Arrange them however you decide, and then draw or take photos of your display. Think about how many different ways your collection can be sorted. Look online to research amazing collections of similar objects, such as this enormous Matchbox car collection. And find photos of other jaw-dropping collections in museums, like the storage units at the National Museum of Natural History.
4. Make a Natural History Exhibit
Collect all of your favorite stuffed animals (or dolls or actions figures) and show them some love by assembling them into a cozy natural history exhibit or mini-wildlife center.
Arrange them around a room, and create little settings for them, if you like. Make museum labels for each one, identifying its name, type of animal, age, and where the stuffed animal is from. Research each kind of animal on the Internet, or in books you may already have, to include information about what they like to eat, where they live, and other interesting facts. If you don’t want to type and print labels, you can write them by hand on index cards. For a big natural history exhibit, look beyond stuffed animals. You can also make labels for plants, pine cones, and rocks.
Download a natural history label template here – CLICK HERE
5. Turn Your Home Into a Science Museum
Don’t limit yourself to having an exhibit in only one room. You can turn your whole house or apartment into a science museum by giving every room a theme and setting up one or two interactive exhibits in each space.
Coming up with names for your science galleries is half the fun. The kitchen could be called Waterworks, with an experiment station about H2O or fluid dynamics. The living room could be called Beyond Earth, with a homemade planetarium. And perhaps the dining area might be something like Let There Be Light, with an exhibit about shadows or color spectrums. Many science museum websites have ideas for at-home DIY science activities. Here are some good ones from our clients at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago and Discovery World.
If you have other ideas for creating museum exhibits at home, our team at Luci Creative would love to hear about them. Our designers are always looking for inspiration. Please share your project ideas with us at hello@lucicreative.com