Pop-up museum

A member of staff said to me at INSET last Friday that all they wanted from INSET was to take away at least one idea to make their teaching better or their lessons more exciting. I agree and this was my favourite idea: a pop-up museum. This came from an inspirational talk from Mandie Haywood, a headteacher from a primary school in Telford. Not only did her school sound like a great place to work – always reinventing the curriculum to make it relevant to today’s learners – but their lessons and activities sounded like so much fun and reminded me why it was that I had chosen to become a primary school teacher. Also they make incredibly good music videos, like they did with this one to celebrate Tim Peake’s space adventure.

I will certainly be using this idea in the future. So here it is:

The pop-up museum

For a lesson with some element of investigation and research, where pupils are being asked to learn about something they haven’t previously had experience of, this is ideal.

1. Create small groups within the class, who will create their museum exhibits together.
2. Provide each group with an envelope with a few key ideas, pieces of information, maybe a website or an image to investigate further.
3. Each group are given a tablecloth and have access to tools and resources to create museum exhibits based around their topic.
4. Time is provided for pupils to research – maybe using tablets or the web to gather more information. Alternatively books or pre-printed information from the web can give groups a head-start.
5. Once pupils have become ‘experts’ at their topic and they have made any exhibits they want to, they arrange their items on their table.
6. As each table has a different set of exhibits, you have in no time at all, created a pop-up museum.
7. Pupils are then free to browse the museum, reading the information and looking at the exhibits at each table.

Ideas to extend this:

• Maybe QR codes could be used to link to additional information about the topic.
• Use homework or projects to provide additional time for this project.
• Write recounts of their ‘visit’ to the museum. Perhaps even open it up to different year groups or classes.
• Other year groups could also create their own pop-up museums at the same time so that the entire school are able to experience a wide range of topics.