Coventry Transport Museum on the road

Clive Parker-Skelhon, our PR & Media Manager was the guest speaker at St. Leonard’s Parish Hall in Marston Green near Birmingham on Wednesday 14th March.
He was the guest of the Marston Greenagers, a lively and vibrant group of around 60 people who meet every week. Clive gave an engaging presentation about the Museum and his role as Head of PR & Media at the Museum.

He started his presentation at 8.15pm and went on till nearly 10pm with a Q & A session. Various brochures about forthcoming exhibitions and events were given out - along with lots of CTM pens. You can never have enough pens!

At the end of the evening, the organiser Carol Osbourne thanked Clive for his presentation and said, “I don’t really like Transport Museums and the like, but I really enjoyed tonight’s talk and will be coming to the Museum with my husband Don very soon. Clive is a very interesting and engaging speaker, his time as radio presenter certainly shows!”.

Clive is always happy to come to your group meeting to give a presentation about the Museum – you can contact him on 02476 234295 or clive.skelhon@transport-museum.co.uk

National Science & Engineering Week

During National Science & Engineering week (9th-18th March) we will be trialling our all new STEM (Science Technology Engineering & Maths) education sessions.

We’ve been busy developing two new sessions with local secondary schools Blue Coat & Coundon Court. The first of the new sessions; ‘Tyred & Tested’ is a science themed workshop that takes a closer look at friction, by exploring the many varied tyres in the Museum collection.

Our Design & Technology themed session ‘Design Challenge’ examines the various elements of vehicle design used for different types of vehicles, and challenges the students to come up with their own model to test.

Both sessions are aimed at Key Stage 3 groups and include a tour-based section, where learners will have the chance to examine the Museum’s eclectic collection, and a workshop-based session where they can test out their theories with creations of their own.

These new sessions will be officially launched in September for the 2012-13 academic year, but Science & Engineering Week seemed like the perfect opportunity to try them out and get some feedback, particularly as the theme this year is ‘Our World in Motion’.

For more info about the Education Sessions available at the Museum , or the new sessions being developed, please visit the Activities for Schools section of our website contact our Learning Team at education@transport-museum.co.uk

Happy New Year from the Learning Team

Happy new year from the Learning team at CTM!

Thank you to all of you who came to visit us on our Christmas activity weekends in December - you made some gorgeous unique Christmas cards and unusual gifts!

Naomi and I are the biggest Christmas fans ever and always feel a little bit sad when the decorations come down and go back into the loft for another year, so it’s a good job we’ve got loads of exciting things planned for 2012 to keep us smiling.

Our work with schools

We are currently working with lots of local schools getting good advice from both teachers and pupils, to help us create brand new school sessions that are completely different from anything the Museum has done before, including sessions for secondary school and college students. Keep an eye out for more information on these soon.

Family Activities

We will continue to hold regular family activity weekends throughout the year, and to make them easy to remember they will take place on the last weekend of the month. The first one will be on 28^th & 29^th January, activities will be themed to our ‘Wheels and Waves’ exhibition of surf vehicles, so come in out of the cold and look forward to the summer while designing your own seaside windmill. (10am – 12noon & 1pm – 4pm Saturday and Sunday)

Who’s counting the weeks until the February half term holiday already?... Well, we are already busy planning lots of interesting events and activities to keep you and your family entertained during all of the Coventry school holidays this year too.

But the most important of our learning team resolutions this year is that we want to make Coventry Transport Museum even more family friendly, so look out for more things you can actually do, things you can touch, things you can try on and things you can play with in the galleries because later in the year we will be asking for families to come in and tell us what you think!

See you soon, Krissy

Easter Activities

We decided to try something new for this years Easter holidays, especially planned for our very youngest of visitors – Storytelling for the under fives!

The first session was yesterday and it went brilliantly we had great fun telling stories, playing musical instruments and “Beep Beeping” along to the most popular story ‘ Little Red Car’.
Please come along to our next two story telling sessions which are free drop in sessions on Wednesday 20th and Wednesday 27th April at 11 – 12 on the mezzanine gallery and join in the fun.

CTM Facilitators

Facilitator Blog - 2011 so far...

It’s been a busy and exciting start to the new year and we’re really pleased with how our themed family learning weekends have been going. Our ‘Through the Decades’ weekends started in January with a closer look at the Victorians, and last week we had our Edwardian weekend. It’s been really lovely to see families having a go at the timeline quiz and drawing trails, and really working together to find the answers. People have had lots of fun trying on bonnets and top hats, while finding out more about how people lived in times gone past. We’re really looking forward to our next Through the Decades weekend in March where we’ll be revisiting the Roaring Twenties – it has been great fun for us finding out all about flapper fashion and this age of decadence. We’ll be dancing the Charleston and learning how to make our very own ‘Mocktails’ (child-friendly, alcohol free cocktails!)



January also saw our Storytelling Weekend as part of National Storytelling week. We were very lucky to have Lady Godiva, aka Pru Poretta, come in again this year to hold some very special storytelling sessions for our younger visitors. This year she also brought Kushumika with her and together they told wonderful stories and had their audiences entranced. All the children really enjoyed this, and I have to say I loved it too - I could have listened all day! Downstairs in the Museum, children created their own stories and turned them into small books or comic strips to take home with them. Thanks to everyone who came and had a go. As well as our 1920s weekend to look forward to we’ve also got our Land Speed Record Weekend in a couple of weeks (19th-20th February) where we’ll be making and racing balloon powered cars, and our Women’s History Weekend at the beginning of March (5th-6th) to coincide with International Women’s day and the Coventry Women’s Festival. We’ll be discovering all about the vital roles women played during the Second World War and there will be a Women’s History Trail that visitors can follow around the museum.

Phew! With all this going on I guess I’d better go and do some work! Hope we see some of you at our weekends very soon! Naomi