Find out how the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery's Ancient Egyptian session can tie into History, English and Art learning for Key Stage 2 students.
Itinerary: Ancient Egypt
Provider: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG), Birmingham
Subjects: History, English and Art
Key Stage: 2
Birmingham Museum Trusts’ education programme provides a wide range of engaging and memorable sessions, self-guided visits and outreach services at nine venues across the city.
From hands-on History at Aston Hall, a 17th century mansion, to Science lab experiments at Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum, there’s a vast programme that brings the school curriculum alive.
Across the various sites, a team of knowledgeable learning officers cater for groups of all ages, but the focus at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) is predominately on Key Stages 2 and 3.
The museum is home to a world class collection of art, objects and artefacts, such as the Staffordshire Hoard, which students have first-hand access to. There is a range of workshops on offer giving teachers a flexible menu of options, including the popular Ancient Egyptian sessions.
Timings
10am: Pupils arrive and are shown to the dedicated education space in the museum where they can leave coats and bags.
10:30am: Groups are collected by a learning officer and taken to their first session, Ancient Egyptian Explorers, in the History Gallery. This workshop is the ideal way to begin the visit as it gives the children an introduction to the Egyptian world through specialised worksheets which they work through together in groups. By navigating themselves around the gallery to find ‘star objects’ they start to build a picture of what one of the earliest civilisations in the world was like.
11:30am: Pupils move to their next session where they get to handle genuine ancient Egyptian artefacts that are more than 3,000 years old. Using a range of skills they check the condition of the objects, document them using digital photography and learn more about how museums care and conserve historical objects.
12:30pm: Time for lunch in the education space, where children reflect on what they have learnt and prepare for the afternoon workshop.
1pm: It’s time for the last session of the day which is a highly interactive and fun mummification show. The children get hands on with all the gruesome jobs that come with the task of mummification preparing a dummy pharaoh for the afterlife. Learning officers make the session entertaining and collaborative, encouraging the pupils to use their imagination and build their confidence through a series of fun tasks. The class teacher becomes the centre of the learning experience as children ask them questions, with the help of the learning officer, to see if they would make it to the Egyptian afterlife, in order to learn more about this ancient belief system.
2pm: Pupils collect their coats and bags and leave the museum. For teachers interested in focusing on ancient Egyptian art, the museum offers another session about the buildings, carvings, sculptures, and paintings the civilisation left behind. In this workshop pupils create their own work of art to take back to school.
To find out more call 0121-348 8001 or visit www.birminghammuseums.org.uk.
