Why not try the following games and quiz ideas to get your family and friends knowledgeable about – and inspired by – art and culture ...
1. Art Quiz
General knowledge quizzes are surprisingly popular among teenagers and young adults, with an abundance of apps available testing their recall of facts against the clock or against other players.
Several dedicated art quiz apps are also available, but for a deeper, more interactive learning experience, why not get your older children creating their own quizzes based around the wealth of information available in virtual galleries?
There are several platforms which allow users to create their own quizzes and test their friends, such as Kahoot ou Quizlet. These apps allow the quiz master to build a quiz and run it live on their friends’ web browser or smartphone. If you wish to allow your child to use these tools, please ensure that you supervise them, particularly during sign-up.
2. Family Art Pictionary
You need:
- 4 or more people
- two smartphones or PCs
- paper and pencils.
Preparation time:
- 10m
What to do:
- Pick an exhibition, artist or section from one of the free online collections. Don’t be too ambitious – the selection should not be so large that the searching phase of the game becomes unmanageable.
- Using their screen/PC, Team 1 chooses an artwork from the selection. They secretly show the artwork to one player from Team 2, who has 2 minutes to reproduce the artwork using paper and pencil.
- Using their screen/PC, the other team 2 player(s) have to identify the artwork from the chosen collection, within one minute of their teammate’s finishing time.
3. Exploring Colours with Younger Children
As well as introducing children to colours and how to make them, this has the added benefits of getting them interested in famous artworks, as well as limiting the number of colours the child is using, saving wasted paint and mess!
You need:
- child-friendly paints, brushes and paper
- a board or children’s mixing palette
- newspaper or old sheets to protect your home
- a mobile phone, tablet, or, better still, Smart TV or laptop (controlled by the adult).
Preparation time:
- 10m
What to do:
- Choose or let your child(ren) choose a favourite colour before using the Google Arts and Culture feature “Explore by Colour” to locate works of art which predominantly use the colour you have chosen.
- Get them to choose a painting they’d like to interpret and help them identify which paints they need to mix to produce their artwork.
- Mix your paints together and have fun!
+ 1! Famous works Pelmanism (memory matching game)
You need:
- online access
- a colour printer
- paper
- scissors.
Preparation time:
- 30-40m
- First, create a new word or powerpoint document and make a table of 5 squares by 3, filling as much of the page as possible. Save this document using the name “artist and works names”. Now save the document again using the name “artworks”.
- Find 15 works of art from the online galleries which you would like your children/family to know about. Copy/paste each work into its own square on the table in the artworks document. You may need to use Snipping tool, Snip & Sketch or similar to select a portion of the artwork which will best fit in the square.
- When you are happy with your artworks table, go back to the “artist and works names” document and for each of the artworks you selected, write the name of the corresponding artist and work.
- Print both sheets using a colour printer. Allow the printer ink to dry.
- If you want the game to last, glue each sheet to a sheet of card and allow to dry (don’t use different coloured cards!)
- Cut each sheet carefully into squares. You should now have 30 squares of the same size – 15 showing the artworks, and 15 showing the information.
- Play the game – place all the squares face down on a table and mix them up well. Player 1 turns over 2 cards and if they match, they keep them and have another go. If they don’t, they turn them face down again in the same place and the next player has their turn. The winner is the player with the most matched cards at the end.
For younger children, instead of using the written information about each artwork, make the game by dividing each artwork into two halves. They then have to match the two halves of each artwork.
More ...
For further tips about teaching and inspiring your children through art, see our teachingEnglish resources page.