How To Use This Blog

Hey! We are excited to share our newest creative adventure with you.

Whether you are a mom, a dad, a grandparent, or just a grown-up who likes to spend time with young children, we hope you will enjoy taking inspiration from cARTie at home!

cARTie, as you know, is an art museum bus for kids that brings the best of early childhood and museum education together. We’re on a mission to make sure all young children benefit from early art and museum enrichment, and we can’t wait for this to extend to your own home.

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Whether it is a rainy day or a sunny day (or you just need a fun, creative, child-centered, and process-oriented activity), we have some ideas and adventures in store.

You’ll notice that our blog activities build upon one another.

This mirrors our approach to partnering with elementary and pre- schools over time and scaffolding learning experiences upon learning experiences in the service of nurturing young students critical and creative thinking, emotional intelligence, collaboration, confidence in museum spaces, and higher order thinking.

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Start with our cARTie Artist Hat activity!

We encourage you to start with our cARTie Artist Hat activity as a way of building your own tools to tap into artist and museum habits of mind by quite literally being able to put on your personally-designed cARTie Artist Hats!

From there, we hope you’ll be able to have endless open-ended conversations and explorations about what it means to be an artist and to feel at home in a museum.

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Follow along:

1. Make Your Own cARTie Artist Hat
2. Finding the Museum at Home Part I (forthcoming)
3. Finding the Museum at Home Part II (forthcoming)
4. DIY Scavenger Hunt (forthcoming)
5. Child-Directed BINGO (forthcoming)

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By no means do you need to follow along in this exact order. However you choose to adapt elements of our #cARTieAtHome activities, we encourage you to think about how one cARTie-inspired activity may lead to the next for you and your child(ren). As early childhood art and museum education aficionados...

Here’s some of our overarching advice:

• Celebrate the process! Your child(ren) will appreciate the freedom to think, create, and play with you. The quality of your activity really rests upon the quality of your time together. Can you find something to smile and laugh at together? Might you hug along the way, noticing every little milestone?
• Listen, really listen! There is nothing more special for your child(ren) than you being interested – really interested – in what they are working on. Ask questions – lots of them – and in a way that supports their thinking. How can you slow down and listen – really listen – to your child(ren) a little more?
• Document! You and your child(ren) will thank you late for taking note of the things they say, the things they discover, and their awesome capacity for learning. Documentation is invaluable for them today and tomorrow. How can you show off your child(ren)’s thinking around your home?
• Get excited! You get to have fun just as much as your child(ren). Show them what it’s like to get excited. We promise: they will pick up on your energy.
• Leave space to learn alongside your child(ren)! See what they think of these activities, and stay curious about how different materials and provocations inspire their experiences.

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Feel free to let us know what resonates with you!

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And as always, let us know if you have special requests and any/all feedback.