Museums designing activities for early childhood education schools

Museums and schools have increased their relationship over the last decades, although early childhood education schools (from 0 to 3 years old) have a limited offer of activities to visit museums. The present research is focused on what museums in Catalonia offer to children's schools under 3. The aim of this paper is to understand the activities, their categories, objectives, organisation and how they are implemented and experienced by children. Methodology is based on museum website analysis (N = 118), museum interviews (N = 11) and fieldwork to observe first-hand the museum experiences. Museums’ activities are categorised into eight typologies, underlining experimentation, guided visit and guided visits with workshops. Most of the activities’ objectives are linked to learning and developing skills. Results reveal that 70% of the activities were created at least 10 years ago. Finally, results also show that children live museum experiences through their spaces, materials and adult interaction.