Make Your Own Museum : An Activity Kit for Children Book

This interactive package is intended not only to introduce children, ages 6 to 12, to the Getty Museum but also to help them explore what museums are and how they function. The text and accompanying activities lead children to discover for themselves the pleasures and challenges of collecting, sorting, trading, displaying, and caring for objects. All the materials necessary to create a small-scale model of three typical galleries in the Getty Museum are included; the same walls and floors can be reversed to create an all-purpose exhibit space. Four-color punch-out cards and reusable sticker reproductions of works of art and other collectibles allow children to create their own exhibits.

The accompanying booklet provides suggestions for activities and answers such questions as, When was the first museum started, and where? Why do people collect things? What kinds of museums are there? and Who works in museums and what do they do?

Andrea Belloli, formerly consulting editor at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is now editorial director/English Language Program at Prestel Verlag in New York. Keith Godard is Principal of Studio Works in New York.

Published in conjunction with the J. Paul Getty Museum, this kit contains everything needed to create a model museum: three free-standing galleries; reusable stickers depicting 70 works of art, from paintings and sculpture to masks and furniture; punch-out figures of visitors and workers; and geometric abstracts for creating original art. Full color.