From the Great Fire of London and the history of medicine to extreme emergency vehicles, schoolchildren are being given the chance to engage with STEM subjects in a different way at a Yorkshire museum.
After an 18-month hiatus due to Covid, Sheffield’s National Emergency Services Museum (NESM) has relaunched its learning and discovery programme with a host of brand new activities, updated workshops and outreach events aimed at learners of all ages.
The museum offers a range of in-house workshops covering curriculum-linked topics like People Who Help Us, Crime and Punishment, and Medicine through Time, many with links to STEM subjects such as design, technology and science. Topics are brought to life through interaction with the museum’s unique spaces, such as its original Victorian cells, historic objects from its collection and, new for 2021, costumed characters to tell the stories of the past.
Other activities the NESM team can bring directly into the classroom include bitesize workshops and talks to classes, updated loan boxes including a mixture of genuine and replica objects from the museum’s collection and the always popular vehicle outreach day - which sees the team visit schools with one of the museum’s amazing emergency vehicles and deliver workshops exploring the vehicle and learning about its driver.
Museum CEO Matthew Wakefield says, ‘’We’re really excited about our new learning and discovery programme. We'ev aimed to make our offer as flexible as possible so whatever the needs and resources of individual schools, wherever they are, and whatever circumstances the new term brings, they can engage with the amazing history we have to share at NESM.’
The museum’s learning programme caters to all ages from early years and key stage 1 to GCSE. For full details go to visitnesm.org.uk/learning.