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

Learning Team Update

It’s been some time since our last blog in July, I can’t quite believe we’re already nearing the end of September. We had a great Summer Holiday here at the Museum, with loads of families taking part in our Ace Activity trails and craft activities. You kept us very busy!
At the end of August we reached the 1980s in our Through the Decades weekends. We were lucky enough to have partnered up with the BBC’s Domesday Reloaded project for this weekend and had an absolutely brilliant time. If you weren’t here you missed our 1980s ‘Bad’ Fashion show, a live (and somewhat amazing) performance from Coventry’s Kombat Breakers, 80s fancy dress, karaoke – and not to forget, THE Audi Quattro from TV series Ashes to Ashes on Millennium Place. Amongst all the 80s fun we even found a couple of people who managed to solve the Rubik’s Cube! We were really pleased with how the weekend went and it certainly looked like all of our visitors had lots of fun.
Behind the scenes over the summer we’ve been working hard at completing our brand new Education Pack, which explains all the different sessions we offer for schools visiting the Museum. We’re really pleased with how it looks and excited about the new sessions we’ve added. One such session is our new Evacuee Experience. We tried it out for the first time on a school group a couple of weeks ago and were very happy with how it went. You can download our new Education Pack on the website.
The new Education Pack is one of a series of changes and updates we’ll be making to the Learning Department at the Museum over the coming months. Watch this space for news of exciting updates and additions to our schools and family programs.
Krissy and I recently attended a really great training day at the ThinkTank in Birmingham, all about working with, and providing for, families in museums. We were both really inspired and came away with a whole host of ideas of how we can improve the Museum for families. We’re working hard to put some of our ideas into practice, so look out for changes over the next month or two and let us know what you think. If anyone has any suggestions of what would make the Museum better for you and your family please feel free to let us know.
As well as getting back into the swing of things with a very busy schedule of visiting schools, we’re also preparing for October half term (which seems to be approaching scarily fast!) This half term our activities and trails will be themed to our forthcoming Wheels & Waves exhibition, which opens on 20th October. So grab your board shorts and come on down!
Ooh – and we’ve also now got our own Coventry Transport Museum Learning Twitter account - please follow us @CTMLearning!
Enjoy autumn everyone - Bye for now x