Many museums and art institutions offer online kids programmes in the best of times, and this has been ramped up since lockdowns first began in March last year.
This year's final school term started last week, with nearly 400,000 children in Auckland, Northland and Waikato still learning from home.
Auckland Art Gallery senior manager of operations and audiences Richard Wormley says they are offering ideas for creative projects which don't involve staring at a screen.
The series of ‘art bubbles’ are based on exhibitions at the gallery.
“They all use found objects from around the house, so you don’t need a special set of paints or art making kits,” Wormley says.
“You can use your baking paper and glue sticks and bits of string to get creative. It’s great for parents to get involved with the kids and do the projects together.”
You can help children learn to make poi and or light bulb landscapes, based on artist Bill Culbert’s exhibition.
"Bill Culbert was an artist who was very creative and playful with his experimentations in light," Wormley says.
"We’ve used the idea of the light bulb as the symbol of an idea to get you thinking about a creative landscape you can create inside that confined shape of the light bulb from around your area."
Artist Charlotte Graham’s installation has inspired an activity that gets children out into the natural environment to create their own korowai cloak.
The activities started back in the first lockdown and new ones are going up every week too, Wormley says.
There are also kid-friendly versions of virtual exhibit tours - Toi Tū Toi Ora (on contemporary Māori art) and Enchanted Worlds (on historic Japanese works).
"[There’s a] family tour component of that where you get a family specific label with a series of questions and prompts that get you really thinking about the works," Wormley says.
"These tours are using a very good piece of software that makes you feel like you’re right in the gallery, you can actually swivel around and look at the space you’re in, if there are works with sound in there you can hear that sound."
The gallery is also planning to make available soon a 14-day activity box to provide some relief from lockdown home-schooling and isolation.
"The focus is on the wellbeing benefits of being creative so we know that focusing the mind is a way of kind escaping that sense of isolation."
And New Zealand Maritime Museum public programmes manager Alison Roigard says they have baking, craft-making and knot tying activities to engage children and their whānau.
There are instruction sheets and videos on how to tie different knots, and Roigard says it can make for a good family challenge to see who can do all four the quickest.
"We’ve even got knot-trying pretzels so you can try your hand at knotting some dough."
The Mini Māui Club grew out of the first lockdown and delivers quarterly packs to children.
"We focus on a different theme each time so last time it was traditional waka – it shows them waka models from our collection and how they’re used as a tool to pass down boat building information through the generations," Roigard says.
The museum also had a competition for children to make sweetheart brooches using items around the house during the last school holidays.
"We also got them to tell us who they would give it to. I think it’s the most heart-warming thing we’ve ever done at the museum, just seeing those beautiful smiling children’s faces with their creations."
