imaginative play

How to Bring More Music Into Your Children's Lives

Chicago Children’s Museum is a huge believer in the power of music for little ones. If you're a parent or caregiver looking to bring more music into your child’s life, here’s a roundup of Chicago Children’s Museum approved activities, resources, and more.

At Home Activity: Bump-It-Up Paint

With today’s at home activity, you can combine a few easy-to-find ingredients to make your own textured paint. Your little ones will satisfy their inner chemist by creating their own paints, then use those paints to create three-dimensional works of art.

It’s an easy, fun, win-win art activity for your whole family.

At Home Activity: Whirl Its AKA Thaumatropes

Today’s at home activity involves a $10 word: thaumatrope.

What’s a thaumatrope, you ask?

It’s an optical toy with a picture on each side that, when spun fast enough, appear to blend into one because of persistence of vision.

At Home Activity: Cardboard Beads

Staying at home gives us a lot of opportunity to reimagine what might otherwise be, well, boring.

Take cardboard, for example.

We’re exploring the different ways you and your kids can use the cardboard lying around your houses for fun, valuable play time, like today’s art activity, Cardboard Beads.

At Home Activity: Build a Ramp

The uses for empty cardboard boxes seem endless—but they can also be opportunities for trial and error, exploring spatial reasoning, and sharpening measurement skills.

Today’s at home activity encourages your little ones to be their best scientific self by using all three of those skills, and more.

At Home Activity: Cardboard Tubes

Toilet paper isn’t as hot a commodity as it was a few weeks ago, but we’ve got one more reason to think twice about this otherwise boring item: the empty cardboard rolls.

Today’s at home activity focuses on another way to upcycle those rolls into a STEM focused, spatial reasoning exercise for your little ones.

So save whatever cardboard rolls you’ve got and let your kids discover their inner architect.

At Home Activity: Body Tracing

At around 3 pm every afternoon, we find ourselves just wanting to lie down for a bit.

Today’s at home activity not only requires you and your little ones to lie down—it turns sprawling out on the floor into a fun art exercise designed to sharpen children’s gross and fine motor skills, as well as their observational abilities and creativity!

At Home Activity: Scrub a Dub

Today's Chicago Children’s Museum parent PSA: not every at home art project requires drawing or crafting.

If you’re worried about running low on art supplies, or simply just not feeling up for more traditional arts and crafts activities, Scrub a Dub has you covered! Simply find a spot that’s safe for splashing (think kitchens, bathrooms, or even outside), fill up a couple of buckets or bowls with water and dish soap, and let the foam sculpting begin.

At Home Activity: The Element of Surprise

Today we’re sharing an activity that is all about how you and your littles can take the most familiar objects around you and turn them into something brand new. And since we’re all about quality play at Chicago Children’s Museum (that’s also a blast)—today’s activity also allows your kids to flex their imagination and literacy skills at the same time.