Project 43: Museums

For the last week of the school year (albeit not for the home education year) we decided to look more closely at the subject of museums. This gave us the opportunity to:

1. Visit museums we'd missed on previous projects.
2. Visit the big national museums before they filled up with school children on holiday.

We started the week with a couple of videos about what a museum is, and their history:

We also looked at how museums are adapting to the digital age with things like Google Arts and Culture, and 3D digitisations of objects such as the Lewis chess set:

Lewis Chessmen by The British Museum on Sketchfab 

We managed to squeeze in seven museum visits this week! We visited Railworld and Peterborough Museum:

We visited the Cartoon Museum and Dr. Johnson's House in London (which we had meant to visit for Project 40: Cartoons and Project 34: Dictionaries). 

And finally, we visited the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, and the V&A (which had a small Beano exhibition on):

Solomon's favourite bits were: reading the pile of Beanos in the Cartoon Museum, the Beano exhibition in the V&A, and the public educator stands at the Natural History Museum, where he got to explore some rocks and dinosaur bones.

We also introduced Solomon to the idea of a cabinet of curiosities, and got him to create his own museum of interesting items:

Solomon's Museum Collection

His is a mixed collection of objects, from a little Star Wars figure he found on the street to a piece of bark from the park where his sister scraped her knee. There is still some spare room in the museum, and the idea is that once it's full he replaces objects when he finds things that are even more interesting. He's currently digging out some gemstones from a kit he got from the science museum, and he plans to add one of those when he finds one.

Excavation kit: Gemstone Dig

We also finally got around to creating an ongoing Big List of Museums we've taken the kids to.

Next week's project: Mario Mario.