There are three free National Museum buildings in Ermita, Manila. So, the practical question: could you do all three in one trip?
You could try, but you do not have to. Pick one building, treat one short visit as the whole outing, and go home. That keeps the plan to one building, and it leaves the other two for another day.
Pick the one that matches today
Not the one that sounds like the right answer. The one that matches whatever your child is pointing at today.
Animals, plants, rocks, or anything to do with the natural world. Natural History. Its exhibits cover Philippine wildlife, ecosystems and geology, and it has a Tree of Life atrium.
Pictures, colour, faces, or finding things inside a picture. Fine Arts. It runs through major works of Philippine painting and sculpture.
Boats, cloth, patterns, old objects, or how people live. Anthropology. Its galleries introduce Philippine communities, traditional objects, boats, textiles and archaeology.
If none of those is obvious, read the three descriptions below and pick the subject you would like to look at together.
National Museum of Natural History
Head to T.M. Kalaw Street, Ermita, for a free family visit with highly visual exhibits.
Here are two ways to look together. Pick two things in one room and compare them out loud: which is larger, which has more colours in it, which one you would each rather look at again. And if you reach the Tree of Life atrium, standing still there for a minute is a reasonable use of the visit on its own. You do not have to move on immediately.
National Museum of Fine Arts
At Padre Burgos Avenue, Ermita, you can explore at your own pace and try simple observation games with your child.
Self-paced means the pace is yours. Rather than reading labels, pick one painting and try an optional prompt or two. Find three things in it that are the same colour. Invent one line that a person in the painting might say. Make up what is happening just outside the edge of the frame. Then decide together whether to move to the next one.
National Museum of Anthropology
On Finance Road, Ermita, you can explore visual galleries covering communities, objects, boats, textiles and archaeology.
Objects give you something concrete to talk about. Choose a boat and work out how many people you each think would fit in it. Look at the textiles and describe one of them out loud: the colours, the shapes, the way the pattern repeats. You can also guess what an object was for before you read the label, and be wrong together.
One building is the whole plan
Here is the part worth deciding before you arrive rather than in the building: how much of it you are going to see.
One gallery is a complete visit. So is one room. So is one object that you both stood in front of for a while. Walking past a whole floor because nobody is looking at it is not skipping anything, and you can decide not to enter every room.
The same goes for leaving. You can leave while the visit is still going well. Admission is free, so there is no paid ticket to use up.
The rule
Pick the building that matches what your child is pointing at today. Let that one building be the entire outing.