There is nothing to compare with the experience of physically visiting galleries and museums with your homeschooled children, but sometimes it’s just not possible. If you aren’t able to visit in person, virtual tours of museums and art galleries allow your students to travel and explore from the comfort of their homeschool desk. Many museums and galleries additionally provide information packs home educators can use as lesson plans and some offer fully curated education packs to work through before, after and during tours.
Museums and Art Galleries to Visit Virtually in your Homeschool
Natural History Museum, London
The Smithsonian (The Smithsonian education packs are excellent)
Visit the Globe (..as part of a Shakespeare study.)
The Dalì Theatre Museum, Florida
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia – a truly unique way to view art, allowing the visitor to filter by colour, lines, light, and space
These are a few of our favourites to date. Where next?
Virtual school trips can include more than art galleries and museums. The internet can make history come alive, bring the theatre into your home and support a musical homeschool curriculum
- Make history fun – explore a time period, experience life during a certain time period or study architecture in-depth with online castle visits and re-enactments.
- Learning about composers? Online orchestral concerts are a fantastic way to introduce the magic of classical music into your homeschool. Extend the lessons with modern adaptions of the musical scores.
- Shakespeare was written for the stage! Studying the text is fun, but watching the plays performed is even more fun. And it’s not just Shakespeare – drama is an excellent addition to a home-ed curriculum and ‘going to the theatre’ an excellent home-ed activity.
Arts and culture feature less prominently in school curricula nowadays but the value of the study of music, art and drama is as relevant to the idea of ‘education’ as ever before.
