Hello All!
Day three at the museum! Thus far things have been fairly fast paced and varied. Day one we helped out with a volunteer information/training session. The museum has a new exhibit on mammoths, which is a travelling exhibit from the Field Museum in Chicago. The prize element is Lyuba (pronounced yew-bah) which is an excellently preserved baby mammoth that was found a few years ago in Siberia. The exhibit is very exciting and seems to have the public excited as well.
Day two involved two visiting school groups to the museum, wanting to see the “Our Living Languages” exhibit and the First People Gallery. The first group was a class from a local school, grades 1-2. They had lots of fun and we talked to them about how the museum uses objects to tell stories. The second class to come through was from Burnaby! They were a grade 4-5 French Immersion class, and after they visited us they went across the street to visit the legislature. We did a similar activity with these kids, but it worked equally well, and the students enjoyed discussing their thoughts and writing them down in their journals.
Day 3 so far has mostly been research. We are working on creating some resources for the volunteers working with the mammoth exhibit. I am currently gathering some information on how Mammoths and Mastodons are different, creating a timeline of their existence and hopefully putting togeather a migration distribution map. Hopefully I have the technological skills to accomplish such a feat!
It sounds like they are giving you a lot of different opportunities! Did you find that there were a lot of differences between the two groups that you worked with on the second day? I am assuming that there would have been some differences because of the age range but did their teachers have similar reasons for bringing them to the museum? Having now seen it from the other side, would you change how you had students engage with information and/or experiences when they are on a field trip. For example, would you have them record their thoughts while they were not the field trip? Would you use the field trip as a jumping off point for a unit?