Virtual Outings and Field Trips for Seattle-Area Kids and Families

Thanks to technology, you don’t have to give up enriching museum visits, even when the buildings are closed. Some museums always have extensive digital experiences, others are still expanding their offerings in response to the pandemic. But all of them are worth checking out.

• Stay Home With SAM is Seattle Art Museum’s blog series featuring video interviews with artists and notable objects from the museum collection. Check out the Georgia O'Keefe paintings.
• Pacific Science Center has dedicated a section of its web page to understanding COVID-19 and another with PacSci-like home activities, from videos to social live-streams, Q&As, and suggested activities and experiments.
• The Museum of Flight’s extensive website includes 3-D self-guided virtual tours and 360-degree panoramas of the interiors of the museum’s most iconic aircraft. 
• The Burke Museum’s new Burke from Home resources page provides activities for younger kids — such as printable coloring pages and crafts — as well as short videos focusing on individual items in the museum’s collection. At two to three minutes in length each, these videos provide a lot more information than just running past the object in the museum — without exceeding young attention spans. 
• Ballard's National Nordic Museum has streamable oral history interviews and digitized highlights of their collections posted online.
• Expecting that museums are unlikely to reopen in time for the planned Cadence Video Poetry Festival, the Henry Art Gallery and Northwest Film Forum are moving the April 15–17 event online. 

When you’ve run out of local museums, remember that many of the world’s most iconic museums are always available for exploration, no travel required, thanks to Google Arts & Culture. The Guggenheim, the Louvre, the Uffizi and more are all just a click away.