Looking for some fun (and educational) summer activities for kids? Create your own architecture-based adventures for your children, utilizing 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. See both in action on MAF’s Architecture for Youth YouTube channel.
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, or as the basis for an after-school or community educational program. 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 educational YouTube channel, Architecture for Youth.
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 on MAF’s Architecture for Youth YouTube Channel 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.
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.