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We're Going on a Treasure HuntHow to make a summertime museum trip with kids worthwhile.

By Emily BazelonPosted Monday, June 23, 2008, at 8:13 AM ET

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I notice now that the "For Kids" link on the FDR Memorial Web site isn't working, which seems fitting, because the monument isn't really designed with children in mind. This is OK, since it's outdoors and has huge blocks of stone and waterfalls as well as that line of beaten-down men that somehow everyone must join. But most of the time, what makes a museum trip work even when you could go to the beach is some form of a treasure hunt. I'm not talking the crown jewels. I mean something, pretty much anything, to look for.

My colleague John Dickerson reminds me that the recent Edward Hopper exhibit at the National Gallery did this well, instructing visitors to look for things in the paintings and then explaining their significance. A twofer. Since the rest of us have already missed that exhibit, I'll also suggest the James Joyce walk in Dublin, and some other Slate family favorites: the Egypt exhibit and family offerings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the mummification lesson at the San Diego Museum of Man, the treasure hunt at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, and the workshops at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. Also, for younger kids especially: the Hands-On House at the Children's Museum in Lancaster, Pa., and the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden gives kids a little shape and tells them to find it around the museum—in a painting, in the architecture, in the bathroom, wherever.

Here is a Web site devoted to formalizing the treasure hunt concept, and I also love the idea of a tour of the Met based on retracing the steps of the protagonists in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler*, which Slate intern Uzoamaka Maduka told me about. And columnist Anne Applebaum gets a prize, I think, for organizing her own hunts for her kids: "We go into the gift shop, everybody buys a couple of postcards, and then they have to find the pictures/sculptures," she writes. You need a good gift shop to make this work; in addition to Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, Anne recommends the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

Hunts also work when they're humble. Last August (late summer, better timing), Eli and I whiled away an afternoon finding pinwheels, footballs, pine cones, and sleds in the quilts hung at the Billings Farm & Museum in Woodstock, Vt. The nice elderly women who run the show handed out those stubby pencils plus a list of objects to find, and off we went.

I've got one final piece of museum-going advice: Take only one child at a time. This is hard to pull off, but—for me at least—it's worth the effort because my kids are never more charming than when I have them one-on-one. Plus, it allows me to cater directly to each of them: Simon doesn't end up at an exhibit at which it matters that he can't read, and Eli isn't asked to find something—anything—to do at the Please Touch Museum one more time. If you need to span an age gap, go to the beach or the lake or the pool. Go there anyway, on some of those sunny days off. But if you're craving air conditioning, and you've got one kid to entertain, the right museum can be like a long, cool drink for you both. Last week, after school ended and before camp began, my mother took Simon to "Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah" at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Input: one kid, a topic he's mad for, and a well-designed show. Output: excursion heaven. Simon didn't even want to go swimming afterward. He was too busy talking about the sights he'd seen.

Correction, June 27, 2008: The sentence originally omitted the word From at the beginning of the book's title. (Return to the corrected sentence.)