“When Schools do not go to the Museum, then the Museum must go to School”. To realize this slogan the Museum of Cycladic and Ancient Greek Art has created its first educational museum-kit. Its main purpose is to introduce children to the Cycladic Civilization, the civilization, that developed in the Cyclades during the third millennium BC, the so-called Early Bronze Age. The museum-kit contains casts of the representative marble idols and utensils of the third millennium BC, copies of tools, rough materials and relevant elucidating material (scientific catalogue, museum publications for children on the Cycladic civilization, slides, maps and handicrafts). The project’s main aim is to enable children to be tought the Cycladic Civilization not only through seeing and listening, but through the knowledge of the rough materials that the ancient inhabitants of the Cyclades used (marble, bronze, opsidian, emery, pumice-stone); to feel and experience the copies of the Museum exhibits and to experiment with copies of Early Bronze Age tools.
The museum-kit can be used at school, either as a visit substitute when a class for various reasons cannot visit the Museum; or for an adequate preparation of the children before a museum visit. Owing to the teachers’ enthusiasm and everpresent zeal, the museurn-kits have already “travelled” to more than sixty schools, mainly in Attica, but also as far as Kalamata, Karpathos, Spetses, Chalkida, Zakynthos, Naxos and Mytilini. The subjects to which the kits refer are the Cycladic Civilization, the Play in Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Attire and Ancient Greek Vases. For any participation in the Museum of Cycladic and Ancient Greek Art educational programs the teacher must contact the Museum in advance. Besides the museum-kit, a wide range of educational material is available at the Museum, some of it can be obtained on loan, other material must be purchased.
