Visiting The National Gallery in London with kids
To make a visit to a massive museum more exciting for children, I think it’s often about the preparations and here are three tips for getting the most out of a visit to The National Gallery with kids:
1. Explore the Katie books
The picture book series about Katie by James Mayhew is wonderful for introducing children to art. In the books, Katie has the ability to go into the artworks, meeting characters and experiencing life at different times. I think these picture books are suited to both young children and children who have already grown out of picture books, as they introduce a variety of artworks in a way that makes art history more accessible to young people. Katie and the British Artists (Orchard Books, £5.99), for example, can be a good book to read before a visit focusing on two of the gallery’s rooms that feature paintings by Constable, Turner and Gainsborough.
2. Get tips from the children’s guidebook
I’ve bought Picture This! by Paul Thurlby (Hodder Children’s Books, £5), which is a kids guidebook to The National Gallery and feature facts that can make a visit more engaging for young visitors. One of the paintings mentioned, for example, has been damaged in the past by a protestor, and something like this can help prompt conversations on what happened at that time in history and restoration work.
3. Make the most of activity books
There is an array of children’s art activity books to choose from these days, including books that take children on a journey through the history of art with stickers and facts and others that can be used in the gallery to delve more into one painting. In the Discover Art with Katie (Orchard Books, £4.99) activity book there’s, for example, a sticker puzzle of Monet’s The Water-Lily Pond, and we used this as an activity to do while visiting the museum. In The Usborne Story of Art Sticker Book (Usborne, £7.99), I like that readers can start with cave paintings and go on a journey from there to explore periods in history and styles that might be relevant on different visits to The National Gallery. This is a comprehensive sticker book that I can see us taking out again and again, as it’s impossible to cover it all in one visit.
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