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Museum Partnerships

Turning the Page partners with local and Smithsonian museums to connect families to Washington, D.C.'s many resources. D.C.'s wide range of museums provides a variety of educational opportunities and new ways to learn. By partnering with these organizations, Turning the Page is able to organize innovative parent workshops and family museum trips.

» Parent Workshop Arts Curricula
» Family Museum Experience

Community Nights Parent Workshop Arts Curricula

Turning the Page has worked in conjunction with two D.C. museums to create parent workshop curricula for Community Nights. The workshops immerse families in the art of the museums and in high-quality children's literature that relates to the art. Parents learn to comfortably discuss and connect art and literacy at home.

Art Links to Literacy: The Phillips Collection

With support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Phillips Collection and Turning the Page collaborated to design and implement a curriculum called Art Links to Literacy, which was first used in the 2003-2004 school year and is being implemented again during the 2006-2007 school year.

This four-session workshop series includes storytelling activities and hands-on art workshops. Two sessions are held at the schools during Community Nights, where parents learn about the relationships between literacy and visual literacy. Parents also look at children's literature to compare the author’s use of written language with the illustrator's use of visual language. While the parents are in the workshops, their children are involved in hands-on art activities with docents from The Phillips Collection.

The remaining two sessions are held at The Phillips Collection. Here, parents and their children are treated to a tour specially customized to introduce the families to the art collected by Duncan Phillips. The families are engaged in discussions about the paintings, including the objects in the paintings and the mood that the paintings convey.

During the course of the four sessions, each participating parent receives four specially selected children’s books to keep and share with their family.

Family Museum Experience

Turning the Page helps parents take advantage of D.C.'s cultural resources and extend their children's learning by sponsoring Saturday visits to area museums. Turning the Page provides free snacks, educational materials and transportation.

Visits to partner museums are:
• Closely tied into D.C.’s educational achievement standards;
• Led by experienced museum staff, focused on hands-on activities and coordinated with related classroom projects to reinforce the students’ regular academic program; and
• Supplemented by TTP-provided books, posters, activity sheets and other learning materials available from the museums and additional resources connected to the museums

In 2007, Turning the Page continued to offer free museum trips to families at our partner schools in order to provide a way to continue family learning experiences beyond the Community Nights season. TTP museum trips ranged from visiting pandas at the National Zoo to trying on World War II era bomber jackets at the College Park Aviation Museum. Participants were led on private tours and provided with materials and children’s books related to the exhibits they visited.

Felicia Tarver commented on what her fourth grade son takes away from these visits, “The trips are also great because we receive books for [my son] related to each activity – books that I would have never thought to buy. Receiving the additional books, and the task of writing journal entries on his summer activities with Turning the Page, is helping to improve his creativity and writing skills.”

2007 Museum Trips

Frederick Douglas House
The National Mall
The National Zoo
Natural History Museum
The National Air and Space Museum
College Park Aviation Museum
National Arboretum