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
Workshops take place in the Museum and include an introduction to the collection, time to explore the gallery and group-work with objects. Workshops are free and last 1.5hrs.
Dinosaur!
KS: early years, 1 and 2
Curriculum links: dinosaurs, working scientifically, living things and their habitats
Discover the Museum’s dinosaurs. In the first part of this session, we’ll hunt for biggest teeth we can find in the museum, compare herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaur teeth, and find how many people can fit in a T. rex footprint. In the second part of the session, we’ll find out more about the museum’s Iguanodon and T. rex fossils.
Discovering fossils
KS: 1 and 2
Curriculum links: working scientifically, living things and their habitats
What is a fossil? We’ll explore the Museum’s fossil collection and find out how we use fossils to investigate life in the past. We’ll learn about how a creature becomes fossilised and about how past life can be reconstructed from fossil evidence. Through a variety of handling objects, we’ll learn how to distinguish a fossil from a recent object.
Under your Feet
KS: 1 and 2
Curriculum links: Rocks and the Rock Cycle, working scientifically
How do rocks form and what are they made of? In the first part of this session, we’ll find out how a rock from the top of Mount Everest and earthquake data helped us to understand plate tectonics. We’ll investigate the three rock ‘families’ and find out where they fit in the rock cycle. In the second half, we’ll get hands-on comparing and grouping igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks using their appearance and physical properties.
What’s so important about flint?
KS: 2 and 3
Curriculum links: working scientifically, uses of everyday material, rocks, Stone Age to Iron Age.
Would humans be where we are today without flint? We’ll start the session by understanding the difference between archaeological and geological time, and find out what Cambridge was like 90 million years ago. In the second half of the session, we’ll explore how the properties of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks make them useful building stones, and by looking at how flint formed we’ll discover the properties that made it so important to early humans.
Evolution in time
KS: 3
Curriculum links: working scientifically, living things and their habitats, evolution and inheritance
In the first half of this session, we’ll discover how old our planet is and what fossil evidence we have for the first life on Earth. We’ll hear how 17th century natural philosophers interpreted fossils and how understanding deep time helps us to understand the process of evolution.
In the second half of the session, we’ll use fossil evidence to see how horses adapted to a changing environment and how that change was driven by geological processes.