Virtual School Trips!

Last term we visited the National Portrait gallery and The Edinburgh Dungeons. There are a number of museums and galleries now doing virtual tours from the comfort of your home. Explore one then pick one (or more) of the activities below:

• Write about one of the artists/exhibitions. What did you learn from it? What did you notice?
• Write a comparison about the difference between visiting a gallery in real life compared to visiting one virtually. What was better? What was worse?
• Recreate a piece of artwork or draw an artifact you seen
• Research one of the artists/exhibitions you experienced and create a mindmap.
• Create a fact file from your research

Some links to virtual tours:
The Vatican
Home to the Pope, and an absolute trove of iconic art, Roman sculptures and architecture. The Vatican offers seven virtual tours, giving 360-degree views of its museum sites, including the Sistine Chapel – be sure to look up, it’s quite the impressive ceiling courtesy of Michelangelo. You can walk around the rooms and zoom in to get a better look. For a peek at Vatican City, this You Visit tour shows off St Peter's Square and Basilica.
https://www.youvisit.com/tour/vatican
 
The Louvre
This Paris museum does offer virtual tours of four exhibits including Egyptian Antiquities and artwork from Rembrandt.
https://www.louvre.fr/en/visites-en-ligne#tabs
 
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
The ecology of African elephants, the skeleton of a massive sea turtle, human evolution, and of course dinosaurs are just some of the exhibits in this Washington DC museum. You could spend a lot of time in here as it's a biggie, spanning three floors. As if it were Night at the Museum, you've got the whole place to yourself, even the empty café… which seems a tad odd, but it does contain a jaws-dropping 52-foot-long model of a mega-toothed shark.
https://naturalhistory2.si.edu/vt3/NMNH/
 
The British Museum
Closer to home, London's British Museum covers the history of cultures across the world. You can take a virtual walk through the museum at Google Arts & Culture, or take a look at this interactive timeline dating back to 2,000,000 BC, where you can select various artefacts that are housed in the museum and learn more about them through images, text and audio.
https://artsandculture.google.com/streetview/british-museum/AwEp68JO4NECkQ?sv_lng=-0.1266024509257022&sv_lat=51.51905368906714&sv_h=326&sv_p=0&sv_pid=JeKwUFYAMWXNWPh3IOg3jw&sv_z=1.0000000000000002
 
Anne Frank House
Have a wander through the hiding place where Anne Frank spent over two years during World War II and wrote her diary. There are then a further seven settings within the house for you to explore.
https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/
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