Designing and organising your activities

Designing workshops

Image: Setting the scene at the start of the workshop.

For the schools’ audience in particular it is important to ensure that the visit to the museum is a unique and stimulating experience and also that it is worth the time taken out of the curriculum at school. Talk to the teacher or group leader before the visit and try to design activities that complement the curriculum that normally goes on at school. Craft and art activities which can easily be done in the classroom as a follow-up activity may not be a good use of time and could be included in teacher’s notes as follow-up activities. Activities which require that the pupil to be near the collection for observation, stimulation or emulation are the type of things that should be built into sessions. Sessions should consist of a range of activities put together so pupils are always moving from a sedentary activity to a more active one and then back again. This keeps the level of interest going but stops excitable behaviour from getting out of hand. For example: 20 minute introductory talk – setting the scene, explaining the context, giving some factual information. 20 minute guided walk and around some of the collection and exhibition. 30 minute trail for the pupils to do in small groups – could be in the form of a ‘quiz’ or ‘find the clues’. 20 minutes of sketching and labelling objects including handling opportunities. 30 minute activity session where pupils use objects (original or replica) or weave the experience into a play (with scripts on prompt cards) or do craft activity which requires specific equipment or access to objects (that can’t easily be done at school). This would comprise a two-hour workshop session, but do also take into account the time it takes younger pupils to organise themselves, move from one place to another, absorb instructions etc. You must also allow time for toilet visits and possible tuck break for very young visitors. At the end of the workshop give the teacher an evaluation sheet so you can get feedback to allow continual improvements to be made. A sample evaluation sheet can be found as a pdf file on the following link: pdf link here