There’s a particular kind of afternoon that happens in our home-ed where someone disappears down a rabbit hole and surfaces an hour later knowing something none of us knew before breakfast. Online museums are responsible for a disproportionate number of those afternoons.
Museums moved online during the Covid lockdowns out of necessity, and the resources they built to support remote school learning didn’t go away when schools reopened. What’s sitting on those websites now — virtual exhibits, lesson plans, teacher guides, primary source archives — is genuinely extraordinary and almost entirely free. For home educators who can’t always physically reach the places they’d like to visit, or whose budget doesn’t stretch to frequent trips, it’s worth treating these sites not as a backup plan but as a first-choice resource.
How to use a museum website as a lesson
The instinct is to sit a child in front of a screen and let them wander. That works — but it works better with a light frame around it. Here’s a simple structure that doesn’t require much prep:
Start offline. Before opening the website, talk about the topic. What do they already know? What do they want to find out? This DK Publishing resource — a behind-the-scenes museum tour — makes a good offline starting point in itself, introducing museum vocabulary and giving the visit a context before it begins.
Then give them the site and a loose brief: spend an hour in the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur collection, or work through the Bayeux Tapestry section and be ready to explain what happened at the Battle of Hastings. The brief matters less than the direction — without it, even the most curious learner tends to click in circles.
Most museum sites have a schools or teachers section. These are worth finding early because they often contain structured lesson plans, printable resources, and guided tours through exhibitions that effectively do the teaching prep for you.
After the visit, ask them to report back. A paragraph, a verbal summary, a drawing — the medium matters less than the act of consolidating what they saw.
Two museums worth bookmarking immediately
Reading Museum turned up when I was searching for Bayeux Tapestry resources and for a while was my home-learner’s favourite site. The tapestry exhibit in particular lets students examine each section in close detail — more closely than a physical visit would allow, with no queues and no time limit. Everything you need to teach the Bayeux Tapestry as a topic is on this site: the historical context, the images, text to read aloud, and enough detail to generate follow-up questions for weeks. We supplemented our visit with worksheets from the School History website and finished with a jigsaw puzzle of a tapestry section — a good way to extend a lesson while letting the information settle.
The Reading Museum blog is also worth bookmarking separately. It’s collaboratively curated with content from multiple museums, and the subject range is wide — Roman history, the NHS, Florence Nightingale, oral histories from the Second World War, and more. It’s a useful place to find a living history resource when you need one.
The Natural History Museum (London) website is the other one we return to constantly. It’s structured in a way that rewards independent exploration — the Discover tab leads to articles, videos, and activities across hundreds of topics — but it also has enough ready-made lesson material that you can arrive with a subject in mind and leave with a plan. The ‘Try at Home’ activities are particularly good for building nature-based learning into the day without it requiring a trip anywhere. And for when you do want to visit in person, it’s one of the best home-ed school trip destinations in London.
Extending further
Google Arts and Culture is worth knowing about as a companion to museum sites — it functions as a second layer of resources for almost any topic, pulling together collections from institutions all over the world. After an afternoon in the NHM’s dinosaur section, it’ll find you two hundred more curated resources to explore. It’s the kind of site that’s safe to leave a curious child browsing unsupervised, which in home-ed terms is a genuine recommendation.
(If you’re looking for other ways to explore geography and the wider world from home, the explore-from-home post has more on that.)
