Edutainment activities for Museums & Cultural venues

Are you a Public Development Manager or Head of Cultural Programs in a museum, library, exhibition space, or other cultural venue? Are you looking for original activities and ideas to engage with families with children?

Wakatoon, French Edutainment specialist, creates fun and educational workshops and activites for museums, medias, libraries, theaters, cinemas, French Institutes and Alliances, and other cultural spaces to reach out to the youngers ones and their families.

Why choose Wakatoon for your workshops, games, and cultural activities?

Engage very young audiences (children aged from 3 to 8)

In France, 50% of national Museums offer activity booklets to children upon entrance as a visitors' guide for families. These are often aimed at the 7-12 years-old age group.

Wakatoon’s fun and educational coloring activities are a perfect addition to enhance your visitor' support materials, schools or family workshop programs. They are perfectly suited for the 3-8 age group, which is less frequently targeted by cultural venues. They also respect the attention span and specific needs of young audiences.

Boost permanent exhibitions with new activities in your cultural space

In France, most national museums offer 6 different cultural activities to families each month. Therefore, themed-workshops are scheduled multiple times a month or even throughout the year.

Our Wakatoon coloring box can be used to bring liveliness to your temporary or permanent exhibitions in cultural venues. You also have the option to change the stories to color, based on your temporary exhibitions.

Provide material for sharing post-visit experiences

Families often keep their visitor guide (paper activity booklet) after visiting the museum, cultural venue or library.

However, with Wakatoon coloring activities, the visit doesn’t end at the museum—it goes on at home. By providing an exclusive take-home resource at the end of the visit, families and children can color together at home and discover a summary of their visit or exclusive information about your exhibition.

Young audiences better retain knowledge through active participation in games than through passive guided tours.

Customed workshop for school audiences

Family audiences and school groups are considered separately when cultural offers are concerned. However, Wakatoon can be adapted for both school and extracurricular activities in museums and cultural venues.

The structure or themes covered can vary to suit mediation tools and visitors' paths proposed to to these 2 types of audiences.

Make your cultural venue family & child-friendly

In France, families with children account for 25% of museum visits. However, making your cultural venue more accessible to families is not always easy. Museums equipped with a dedicated Children's' space are those that attract the most family visits (for example, 'La Cité des Enfants', the Centre Pompidou, the National Museum of Natural History...).

By offering child-friendly workshops that allow you to engage with families, you'll be able to attract new visitors to your cultural venue. Libraries, cinemas, and museums have already bet on Wakatoon’s creative workshops to enhance their event programs.

Differentiate your exhibitions with our original edutainment activity

Visitor guides, creative or cultural workshops, storytelling tours, guided tours, mentored activities, quizzes, escape games, treasure hunts : more and less original ideas abound to energize cultural venues. Museums are becoming more inventive to attract family audiences.

With Wakatoon coloring cartoons, an original, creative, and educational experience is provided to your visitors. The magical feature of our colorings turning into an animated drawing has already captivated many families. Our coloring stories can easily be incorporated into your family workshop and activity programs.

Our Cultural & Edutainment collabs

We have worked with many cultural and educational venues to create a tailor-made activity to enhance children and families experience. Here are some of the projects we have worked on:

A different activity for le Musée en Herbe 

For 4 months, the Musée en Herbe has used the Wakatoon Box to enhance children and parents' visit experience. The animated coloring theme they chose reflected that of the exhibition : Mr. Men and Little Miss. To extend this experience at home and leave visitors with a souvenir of the exhibition, a coloring postcard to discover the end of the story was given to children to take home.

A fun and educational workshop at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie

Wakatoon Studio stories are made available in the Science and Industry Cité Library in their schools workshops throughout the year. Thanks to Wakatoon, children can turn their coloring pages into an animated drawing and add their voices. These workshops help children, for whom French is not the native language, to develop their language skills.

You can find the interview with the mediator from the Cité des Sciences about the workshop here.

A child-friendly event for the Médiathèque de Nancy

The City of Nancy has chosen to organize creative coloring workshops at the media library to encourage families to visit. In partnership with ATD Quart Monde, the activity was specifically aimed at children of migrants who have recently arrived in France.

Parisian libraries often use Wakatoon to host creative workshops for families.

Awareness activities in Paris' schools

Les cours Oasis chose Wakatoon colorings to educate students about the issues and uses of this eco-friendly project for school audiences. The animated coloring 'The Oasis Schoolyard' was custom-made by us for La Ligue de l’Enseignement and the City of Paris.

Alliance Française de Hong Kong : workshops to learn French

For the Alliance Française in Hong Kong, one of the venues representing French culture abroad, Wakatoon coloring activities were used by FLE (French as a Foreign Language) teachers for French-learning purposes in educative workshops.

More about the workshops at Cité des Sciences

To find out more about the creative and educational workshops at the Museum Cité des Sciences, please watch this video.

Attracting Families, Young Audiences, and Children to Museums and Cultural Venues

At Wakatoon, we believe that the "hurdles" that young audiences face when visiting museums and other cultural venues can be overcome through Edutainment. Combining play and pedagogy, our animated colorings educates children on your exhibitions' themes while entertaining them. This original activity allows museums and educational venues to efficiently pass on cultural knowledge through games and entertainment.

Making Museums More Fun and Mainstream for Young Audiences

Taking children to cultural venues can sometimes be challenging. The Mom'Art Association even published a "survival guide" for families visiting museums. Here are our tips for making cultural collections more accessible to young audiences.

Children aged 3-6 are a group often overlooked by museums. Visitor support materials are available for families, but they primarily target children aged 7-12.

Medium explains that young audiences prefer games over the traditional "guided tour." Children retain information better when learned through games. The article details the specific needs of different age groups within young audiences:

  • Ages 3-5 are more sensitive to bright colors and movement. Animated coloring workshops are particularly suitable for this age group.
  • Ages 6-8 enjoy storytelling and tales related to museum collections and exhibitions. Here, the magic of coloring transforming into a story and animated drawing works well.
  • Ages 8-10 are interested in what they will do in the future: passionate professions. Science museums, history museums, museums of civilization, or fine arts museums: it's your opportunity to offer stories related to these aspirations.
  • Ages 10 and up prefer more complex activities: escape games, murder parties, treasure hunts, investigations, and scavenger hunts in museums.

Parents want their children to retain and reapply what they've learned during cultural visits. Wakatoon’s animated coloring activity allows them to keep a trace of the visit (through activity booklets or downloadable coloring pages via a QR Code on the interactive station).

Family-Friendly & child-friendly offerings

Family-friendly offerings are typically accessible online in less than 3 clicks on the websites of major national museums in France. For instance, the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie created a space specifically dedicated to young audiences and families: the "Cité des Enfants" in 2009.

Engaging Parents in Knowledge Sharing

From the age of 3, children imitate their parents and the behaviors they've observed in cartoons and games. Parents play a key role in sharing knowledge and culture. According to an article from Cairn, for 1 in 5 families, museum visits or trips to cultural venues are especially important for the "transmission of cultural capital." Educational activities designed for family audiences should therefore also involve the parents. For example, the visitor guide at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme includes a scene at the end of each chapter aimed at encouraging discussion between (grand)parents and children.

Wakatoon solutions are particularly suitable for this, as families can take the coloring activity home and continue to Wakatoon together.

Differentiating Your Cultural Venue with a Modern Family Strategy

Activities for children or family audiences in museums are scheduled regularly, typically on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. For example, the Musée du Quai Branly offers a variety of family activities, including workshops, storytelling tours, and even an escape game.

Most museums offer fewer than 6 family activities per month, with themes that can be reused from month to month or within the same month. For example, the Musée de la Renaissance offers observation games.