| Hello, and thank you for asking me to your teachers' meeting to talk about the Dinosaur Museum |
| and to tell you a bit about what you can do with your students there. |
| Well, let me give you some of the basic information first. |
| In regard to opening hours, |
| we're open every day of the week from 9 am to 8 pm |
| except on Mondays when we close at 1.30 pm. |
| And, in fact the only day in the year when we're closed is on the 25th of December. |
| You can book a guided tour for your school group any time that we're open. |
| If you bring a school group to the museum, |
| when you arrive we ask you to remain with your group in the car park. |
| One or more of the tour guides will welcome you there |
| and brief you about what the tour will be about. |
| We do this there because our entrance is quite small |
| and we really haven't got much room for briefing groups in the exhibition area. |
| As far as the amount of time you'll need goes, |
| if you bring a school group, |
| you should plan on allowing a minimum of 90 minutes for the visit. |
| This allows 15 minutes to get on and off the coach, |
| 45 minutes for the guided tour |
| and 30 minutes for after-tour activities. |
| If you're going to have lunch at the museum, |
| you will, of course, have to allow more time. |
| There are two cafés in the museum, with seating for 80 people. |
| If you want to eat there you'll need to reserve some seating, |
| as they can get quite crowded at lunch time. |
| Then outside the museum at the back there are tables, |
| and students can bring their own lunch and eat it there in the open air. |
| When the students come into the museum foyer, |
| we ask them to check in their backpacks with their books, lunch boxes, etc, at the cloakroom |
| before they enter the museum proper. |
| I'm afraid in the past, we have had a few things gone missing after school visits, |
| so this is a strict rule. |
| Also, some of the exhibits are fragile |
| and we don't want them to be accidentally knocked. |
| But we do provide school students with handouts with questions and quizzes on them. |
| There's so much that students can learn in the museum |
| and it's fun for them to have something to do. |
| Of course, they'll need to bring something to write with for these. |
| We do allow students to take photographs. |
| For students who are doing projects |
| it's useful to make some kind of visual record of what they see |
| that they can add to their reports. |
| And finally, they should not bring anything to eat into the museum, |
| or drinks of any kind. |
| There are also a few things the students can do after the tour. |
| In the theatrette on the ground floor, |
| there are continuous screenings of short documentaries about dinosaurs which they can see at any time. |
| We used to have an activity room with more interactive things like making models of dinosaurs |
| and drawing and painting pictures, even hunting for dinosaur eggs, |
| but, unfortunately, the room was damaged in a bad storm recently when water came in the roof, |
| so that's closed at the moment. |
| But we do have an IT centre |
| where students have access to CD ROMs with a range of dinosaur games. |
| These games are a lot of fun, |
| but they also teach the students about the lives of dinosaurs, |
| how they found food, protected their habitat, survived threats, that kind of thing. |
| And... I think that's all I have to tell you. |
| Please feel free to ask any questions if you would like to know anything else... |