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Thursday, September 26, 2024 - 10:00am to 3:30pm
600 E Locust St,
Des Moines,
IA
Calling all homeschool families! Spend the day at the State Historical Museum of Iowa with a variety of special programs and activities throughout the day for families to learn about Iowa history together. Join one of the many scheduled activities, register for a museum collection tour, and learn about our Primary Source Sets and educational resources. Find the complete program schedule below. It will be a fun (and educational) day at the museum for all ages of learners.
Younger children are welcome to attend with their caregiver. Adult supervision is required throughout all the programs. Registration is requested but not required to attend scheduled programs. Register here.
| Program Time | Age Recommendation | Program Name | Program Description |
| 10 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. | Ages 6 and up | Masterpiece Mystery | Learn how art from the museum collection can be viewed differently through a fun hands-on activity. Young historians will describe a painting from the collection while the adults try their best to draw their own version of the artwork. What masterpiece will you create and will the story match the piece from the collection? |
| 11 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. | Ages 8 and up | History Mystery Activity | Are you a super sleuth? Young historians alongside their adults will examine mysterious selected objects from Iowa's past. After a thorough investigation, participants will guess how the historic objects were used and who might have used them. |
| 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. | -- | Lunch & Learn | Enjoy lunch on your own. Bring a picnic to eat on the Iowa Capitol grounds or visit a local restaurant in the East Village neighborhood. Stop by our educator resources table to learn about the wide variety of State Historical Museum of Iowa’s resources for teachers. |
| 1 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. | Ages 6 and up | See, Think, Wonder! | Become a detective by looking closely at historical photographs and making careful observations to determine the history of the picture. This activity will feature photos from our Goldie’s History Kits. |
| 2 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. | Ages 6 and up | Fossil Examination | Your young historians are really going to dig this activity. Alongside their adult, students will have the opportunity to work with fossils from the museum vault. Like paleontologists, students examine fossils and try to figure out their origin. |
| 3 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. | Ages 8 and up | Family Museum Collection Tour | Step inside the State Historical Museum of Iowa’s collections storage for a behind the scenes look at objects from Iowa’s past. The Family Museum Collections Tours takes young historians (ages 9 and up) and their families on a 30 minute guided tour through the museum collection vault as we explore a small sample of the museum’s 80,000 objects. |