Museum with kids: ICA BOSTON PLAY DATE

As I’ve written about in previous posts, I love to take my girls on adventures and museum trips have been a favorite lately. We recently visited the ICA in January and had a blast! I’ve shared some of our favorite exhibits and activities below.

Nicholas Nixon Exhibit

This was one exhibit I was eager to see. Nixon is a Boston-based photographer who photographed four sisters every year (one of them his wife) from 1975-2007. This is his ongoing project titled The Brown Sisters. The concept was intriguing and my girls even enjoyed seeing the changes of these women over time and hearing the story behind it. Definitely worth checking out!

Family Art Making: Animating Characters

Museums always come up with the best activities for children to participate in. This time around my girls made animated characters and used their creativity to come up with them on their own. It’s fun to watch them create their own imaginary animated characters.

Family Film Program

I never thought of introducing kids to movies of different backgrounds or documentaries but after seeing a few short films from the New York International Children’s Film Festival, we were hooked! Riceballs from Australia and Welcome To My Life from the USA were two favorites. The others movies we watched were in Italian and Hungarian and it was mostly animation and less dialogue so my 6-year-old could follow by reading the subtitles, and I helped my 5-year-old when she needed it.

We also watched both Revolting Rhymes movies based on the rhymes written by Roald Dahl and illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Needless to say, watching these movies was our favorite activity from this visit. I have been trying to get a hold of more independent kids movies to offer the girls variety and to expose them to different cultures. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a way to access more films from the New York International Children’s Film Festival. I did, however, find https://facets.org/kids/ - a platform that gives kids access to global independent movies to promote creativity, engagement, and curiosity. It is subscription-based and the girls and I have been enjoying it lately. We have really enjoyed a few movies, and a few not so much but the best part is these are really short films and touch a variety of interesting topics. It’s been an enjoyable experience and a great alternative when we don’t have the time to watch an entire commercial movie, but still want to sit and watch something together. I’ll share more about our experiences with Facets in a separate blog post.

Now back to the ICA. We stayed at the museum for about 3 hours before we got hungry, and since there is no longer a cafe, we headed elsewhere for food. The rest of our time at the museum was filled games of I SPY and even some outdoor time because the weather was surprisingly nice for January. We’re excited to go back again soon! In fact, if you are in the Boston area and looking for something fun to do this Saturday, check out ICA Play Date, a fun, family-centered day at the museum.

Also check out our 7 tips to take kids to an art museum.