Education News - 27th May 2011

STEAM Education Gets Top Marks for Educational Visits!

We’re fast approaching the end of another incredibly busy year with school visitors to STEAM. About 20,000 children a year come to experience our hands on interactive workshops, stepping back in time to the eras of Queen Victoria and the Home Front during WW2 (not at the same time!)

The Education Team is spending the summer planning and developing new activities to enthuse children, ready to launch at the beginning of the new academic year in September.

We’ve had great fun putting ourselves into the shoes of children and devising lots of new ways to use original objects, photographs and drama with schools. We can’t wait to try them -  if we grown ups didn’t stop laughing, then neither will the children!

We are enhancing our hugely popular We’ll Meet Again event for schools, which runs for two weeks every autumn and spring, based on feedback from our school customers.  Children will be up and moving when they come to immerse themselves in life in 1940! Jitterbug, anyone? Doubtless, there will be quite a few ‘Black Bottoms’! Regular visitors will spot new activities relating to wartime childhood and cracking codes. Ladies in a local care home are reminiscing about their own memories of being little girls in wartime, ready to share their stories with us (whilst spanning the eras by crocheting Victorian costume for children to use at the same time!)

However, the most exciting news for us and for our school visitors is that STEAM Education has just shown itself to be at the ‘top of the class’ for school educational visits by being the first heritage site in Wiltshire to be awarded the Learning Outside the Classroom Quality Badge. For us, this means that we have been nationally recognised by the Council for Learning Outside the Classroom for both the quality and safety of the experiences we offer school children and teachers. For schools and teachers, this means that they can cut red tape when planning to take children to our Museum and do not need to carry out their own risk or quality assessments.

We are absolutely delighted to be the first in Wiltshire, it is a huge coup for the Education team and all the staff here at STEAM and we look forward to welcoming even more children and young people from across the region to our wonderful Museum.