Want to provide your children with creative and educational activities as summer winds down? Why not utilize MAF’s free, fun, and educational architecture-based resources, ‘Architecture: it’s Elementary’ and ‘ArchiTreks’?
Both programs are based on STEAM learning principles, and provide dynamic learning opportunities that engage children’s imaginations and curiosity about their surroundings. Don’t forget to include MAF’s books from MAF’s Build Imagination Collection, which features more than 100 books for kids on architecture and the built environment:
Let’s Use Our Imaginations! MAF’s Architecture: it’s Elementary! is a multi-disciplinary educational curriculum designed to introduce students from kindergarten through grade five to architecture and the built environment. Developed with input from Michigan educators, the curriculum provides kids with critical STEAM-related learning opportunities, through lessons and activities that engage their minds, bodies, and imaginations.
Each activity can easily be done at home with siblings, parents, or small friend groups. Activities include acting out structures, measuring, learning about animal habitats, drawing from memory, and putting on a play that imagines how cities began. You can download the lessons and activities here, and view the program in action on MAF’s Architecture for Youth YouTube channel.
Let’s Go on an Adventure! MAF’s ArchiTreks is a video program aimed at getting kids excited about architecture, science, and engineering through segments that take kids on neighborhood adventures to explore shapes, structures, landmarks, and preservation, and pique curiosity about their surroundings.
Created by MAF in partnership with Detroit Public Television (DPTV), each of the ArchiTreks video segments feature fun activities that can be done at home or on a neighborhood walk with parents, siblings, or with friends. Along the way, kids can discover architectural treasures, and learn more about gravity’s role in architecture, architecture’s role in their neighborhoods, and more. View MAF’s ArchiTreks segments in action on the Michigan Learning Channel.
Let’s Read! MAF’s Build Imagination Collection of architecture books is a great way for young children to learn about the built environment and explore the world through architecture. The books are housed at Birmingham’s Baldwin Library, and available to borrow at libraries statewide through MeLCat, Michigan’s free interlibrary loan system. (contact your local library for more information, and for any ongoing COVID-related changes to hours and borrowing information).
Studies show thought processes that nurture creativity and critical thinking begin at a young age. MAF’s educational-based resources are designed to help foster those processes in kids while stimulating curiosity about their surroundings, through fun activities that appeal to elementary school-age students. Visit https://michiganarchitecturalfoundation.org/education/resources-for-kids/ for more information.