Family Programs

Anchorage Museum invites all ages to the conversation

61º Workshop

The Anchorage Museum invites families to experience the museum in a new way. Visitors and their children immerse themselves in a museum exhibition through fun activities, gallery games and lively discussion. 61º Workshop programs encourage creative and critical thinking with active experiences — inside the museum and out. These programs emphasize critical and creative thinking as learning and through creating experiences that cannot be found through formal education. The museum works to nurture budding talent by exposing participants to leaders from every field. Learning about the way artists, architects, scientists, designers, historians and other content professionals think and work is especially helpful for young people. Concepts such as working collaboratively in teams, solving complex problems within defined limitations, 21st-century skills, and experiencing empathy are part of rich programs that connect families to content.

Blink

The Anchorage Museum's Blink series introduces children 5 and younger and their families to a range of activities, including open-ended play, hands-on workshops, literacy and storytelling, art, and science. Preschoolers and toddlers get creative, experiment and play with a variety of hands-on activities and demonstrations. New themes and ways to explore the museum throughout the year.

Museum in Minecraft

The Anchorage Museum has hosted several Minecraft events to re-create the museum in the popular game. A member of the museum’s Innovation Board is working on creating a virtual tour of the museum through Minecraft.

Cloud Cover

Cloud Cover is a series of programs that activate the North through technology. The Anchorage Museum is using 3-D printing to replicate objects in our collection, putting GoPro cameras in the hands of students, and re-creating the museum in the popular game Minecraft. The Smithsonian’s Spark!Lab invites visitors to become inventors. Cloud Cover includes technology-based programs for youth, engaging the new “digital generation.” The museum has an Innovation Board that invites youth to advise the museum on technology and innovation.

Urban Interventions

Explore the ways that urban artists and youth and others express identity through workshops, programs, museum interventions, and temporary installations. The Urban Interventions series aims to empower youth through healthy creative expression. Previous programs included Tupik Mi about Indigenous tattooing and Skate Art about skateboarding and graphic design. Upcoming programs include graffiti.

Museum as community center and insight into a place

The Anchorage Museum’s atrium is a gathering space for engagement, offering ways to experience the North through technology, readings, films, families, visual imagery and food.

A daughter’s legacy sparks interest in science

Brooke McPheters was so eager to volunteer in the Anchorage Museum’s Discovery Center, she started the week she turned 13, the first week she was eligible. She quickly became one of the museum’s most devoted and enthusiastic teen volunteers. She was killed by a drunk driver at age 15. Her parents Shanna and Gary made a gift to the Anchorage Museum in tribute to their daughter. Her specialty was interacting with museum visitors, demonstrating science experiments and answering questions. The Exploration Station in the Discovery Center, dedicated in Brooke’s memory, is a place where visitors touch and test science and where they can ask questions. Visitors can learn about the Earth’s surface by drilling “core samples” in candy bars, determine the iron content in breakfast cereals, take apart modern electronics, and more, learning that even the youngest among us have the ability to observe and question, just as scientists do.