School Activities

    Our school activities are suitable for all ages and levels including primary, secondary and A-Level. We offer workshops, hands-on activities and a teacher support service to help you get the most out of your visit. All school services are free, but must be booked in advance.

Darwin Centre

    Find out who you really are and where you come from in our interactive films about evolution, described by Sir David Attenborough.

Hands-on Activities

    Get up close and personal with Museum in these hands-on activities, where you can handle real specimens from our collections. Hundreds of real, natural history specimens for students to touch and explore are in our hands-on science centre.

Self-led Activities

    Pupils can engage with specimens through role-play in a self-guided explorer challenge through the Museum.

The Great Debate School Program

    Students are introduced to the history of the debate during a lively tour. They are then divided into groups and use exhibits to prepare presentations representing the views of the debated key characters.

Booking

    All school activities must be booked in advance by calling the schools booking line: 4420 7942 6666.

    At 27, after serving in World War II, I dreamed of owning a piece of land. So I moved from central Illinois to Shelbina, Missouri, and bought 236 acres for $6,000. The land was situated on a dirt road and was half farmland and half trees, with an old house that had no running water or electricity. Obviously, it was not what you'd call a perfect farm. But it was mine.

    I was alone for the first time in my life, and I found it liberating. My days were filled from dawn until dusk with plowing and planting corn. Dinnertime came and went, and I barely remembered to eat.

    I wouldn't say I was a great success at farming in Missouri. However, when I went to the store to buy some tools, I met a nice woman named Claudette working behind the counter. I also ran into her at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Shelbina each week. I found out later that her manager kept asking her about “that tall boy from Illinois living out in the country in an old house with no water, no electricity and no housekeeper.”

    Claudette and her sister soon visited my farm and put up some curtains. To show my appreciation, I took Claudette out for a ride in my truck. We married in 1954 and have now been together for more than 62 years!

    I later sold the Missouri farm for a $3,500 profit and bought 40 acres in Illinois. For many reasons, buying the Missouri farm was a good idea. I will always cherish memories of owning the farm and meeting my beloved.

    He was a poet known for the nostalgia he describes in his poems. Now, it's time: for us to express our nostalgia for this great writer.

    On Dec 14, 2017, the famous Chinese poet Yu Guangzhong passed away in Taiwan. Born in 1928 in Nanjing, Jiangsu, Yu studied in Sichuan when he was young. At that time, he had showed great interest in Chinese poems and spent a lot of his free time trying writing poems himself. Then he managed to publish his first poem at the age of 20. A year later, Yu and his family moved to Taiwan. He lived and worked there until his death.

    Nostalgia is Yu's masterpiece in which he expresses his homesickness for the Chinese mainland when he was in Taiwan.

    Published in 1971, the poem remains highly popular among Chinese speakers worldwide. Even those who know little about literature are familiar with lines from the poem. The poem is included in Chinese high school textbooks.

    Besides his achievements in poetry, Yu was also a successful essay writer, critic and translator. He once translated English poet Siegfried Sassoon's poem In Me, Past, Present, Future Meet into Chinese. It is regarded as an accurate and powerful translation, in which the most famous line is “心有猛虎, 细嗅蔷薇” for “In me the tiger sniffs the rose”.

    Yu spent his whole life writing. “The reason why I stick to writing till today comes down to my passion for the Chinese language,” he once said in a 2015 interview. He then added that this passion was strengthened by his love for his mother and His motherland.

    Now, let's appreciate the poem Nostalgia.

    With child behavior, there is almost much more than it meets the eye. Because it occurs at so many different levels, child behavior that seems simple at one level can often be much more complex and meaningful at another.

    For instance, a little child's pattern of getting into cupboards, drawers and closed rooms, even after being told not to, is easily considered as bad behavior. When viewed at that level, the pattern is unacceptable and could lead to punishment. But it can be viewed at a more complex and meaningful level, namely child exploration. If a child regularly experiences an angry parent who seems determined to prevent any exploratory activities, the child will decide to continue to achieve future discoveries. When parents view this behavior as born out of natural curiosity rather than simple opposition, they are more likely to accept and appropriately monitor it. Although it may lead to warning responses to ensure the child's safety, it is less likely to lead to punishment.

    There are countless other examples. Holding a goldfish outside its bowl is foolish at one level but also can be seen as a young child's attempt to express physical affection for a pet. Spending time with friends rather than family is selfish at one level but also indicates a teen's need for independence.

    The point here is that child behavior is often exhibited in simple forms that can appear to be oppositional, selfish or generally unacceptable if viewed only at that basic level. However, when viewed at a more meaningful level, the same apparently simple behavior can be seen as something larger and potentially more adaptive. This doesn't mean the behavior should be ignored, especially if it is inappropriate. But looking at the bigger picture of a child's behavior, adults might gain a fuller understanding of what they're dealing with, which can create more flexibility in how they respond.

    I use tea to refer to a snack(点心)taken in the late afternoon or early evening (ie after getting home from work but before the main meal, which I call dinner) and I don't think that's rare(罕见)at all. I think the difference is when you originally had your main meal and I would agree that it's a class thing, not a north/south thing(I've heard the midday meal referred to as both lunch and dinner by different people in all areas of England).

    Dinner was always the main meal. In the past, working class men worked near(or even at)home and came home for their main meal at midday, and so that was their dinner. Middle class men worked in offices far from their homes(often working in the city centre, and living outside the city) and so couldn't go home for a meal at midday. They therefore had a light meal at midday and had their main meal with their family in the evening after they go home from work, so dinner was in the evening. Because most children at state schools were working class, we still use dinner for school meals. For middle and upper class people, tea was a light snack served in the mid-afternoon at which ladies(who didn't, of course, go out to work)could entertain their friends. For working class people, however, tea was the light snack you had before going to bed. Supper, for all classes, was the light snack you had before going to bed.

    However, because work patterns changed and many working class people started eating their main meal in the evening too, dinner, tea and supper started to become interchangeable for them. Also many working class families have since become middle class, so the terms have become less of a current class thing(if class still exists at all) and more of a system of terminology inherited(家族术语)from grandparents etc, different from family to family. When I was a child(Southern English, middle class family, but with working class forebears(祖先)) we called the midday meal dinner and the evening meal tea, but when I was in my early teens I had a new stepfather(from a family that had always been middle class for generations)who used lunch and dinner, and that's what I've used ever since.

    The negative (负面的) health effects of sleep shortages during the week can't be changed by marathon weekend sleep sessions, according to a new study.

    Researchers have long known that routine sleep deprivation (缺乏) can cause weight gain and increase other health risks, including diabetes. But there are still some people who hope that shutting off the alarm on Saturday and Sunday will repay the weekly sleep debt and remove any ill effects.

    The research, published in Current Biology, ruins those hopes. Despite complete freedom to sleep in and nap during a weekend recovery period, participants in a sleep laboratory who were limited to five hours of sleep on weekdays gained nearly three pounds over two weeks and experienced metabolic disruption (代谢紊乱) that would increase their risk for diabetes over the long term. While weekend recovery sleep had some benefits after a single week of inadequate sleep, those gains were wiped out when people returned right to their same sleep schedule the next Monday.

    "If there are benefits of catch-up sleep, they're gone when you go back to your routine. It's very short-lived," said Kenneth Wright, who led the research. "These health effects are long-term. It's kind of like smoking once was — people would smoke and wouldn't see an immediate effect on their health, but people will say now that smoking is not a healthy lifestyle choice. I think sleep is in the early stage of where smoking used to be."

    Wright said that the study suggests people should prioritize sleep — cutting out the optional "sleep stealers" such as watching television shows or spending time on electronic equipment. Even when people don't have a choice about losing sleep due to child-care responsibilities or job schedules, they should think about prioritizing sleep in the same way they would think about a healthy diet or exercise.