The Sedgwick Museum collections offer many links to the National Curriculum and provides an invaluable opportunity to see unique objects from the distant past.
Available facilitated workshops and risk assessment
Please carry out your own risk assessment before your visit. The Museum risk assessment can be viewed here
Dinosaur!
KS: early years, 1 and 2
Curriculum links: dinosaurs, working scientifically, living things and their habitats
Format: Seated talk with some object handling.
Further information: How have scientific ideas about life in the very distant past changed? Using dinosaur fossils as sources of evidence we will investigate how our understanding of dinosaurs has changed over time, and how it continues to change as we find more fossil evidence. We’ll discover just how rare dinosaur fossils are and look at some examples of how we interpret fossils by looking at the characteristics of animals that are alive today.
Discovering fossils
KS: 1 and 2
Curriculum links: working scientifically, living things and their habitats
Format: Seated talk with some object handling and group work.
Further information: What is a fossil? How do we learn about life in the past? A talk with object handling which emphasizes scientific enquiry and ideas and evidence. We'll investigate how a whole animal can be rebuilt from just a few bones and build an understanding of why creative thinking is such an important skill for palaeontologists. We'll also look at why some myths and legends might well be based on fossils.
Under your Feet
KS: 1 and 2
Curriculum links: Rocks and the Rock Cycle, working scientifically
Format: Seated talk with some object handling and group work.
Further information: How do rocks form and what are they made of? We’ll investigate the rocks beneath our feet and how the different families of rocks form. Introducing the terms igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary we’ll get hands on with rocks from the collection, see where they belong in the rock cycle and have a basic introduction to geological time.
What’s so important about flint?
KS: 2
Curriculum links: working scientifically, uses of everyday material, rocks, Stone Age to Iron Age.
Format: Seated talk with some object handling and group work.
Further information: Would humans be where we are today without flint? By looking at Stone Age to Iron Age materials we’ll discover the properties that made these materials so important to early humans and the geological processes behind their formation. We will also gain a sense of the difference between archaeological and geological time.
Evolution in time
KS: 2 and 3
Curriculum links: working scientifically, living things and their habitats, evolution and inheritance
Format: Seated talk with some object handling and group work.
Further information: Discover just how long life on Earth has been around and why there is such a diversity of living things today using fossil evidence. We’ll use fossil horses’ limbs to understand how the species adapted over time to suit the changing climate and environment. We’ll also look at what geological processes drove that environmental change.