Toolkit for Museum in Your Classroom

Making a museum in your setting or classroom is easy and children can learn all kinds of historical skills as well as developing their mark making and writing. Tees Valley Museums are a consortium of seven venues across the Tees Valley. Together they have created online support to develop a museum that can be viewed either at home or in the classroom setting.

The toolkit supports you as a teacher through the process of making a school-based museum in a series of simple steps. It’s a comprehensive resource, slightly more aimed towards Key Stage 2 classes, so it might be best to begin by reading the case study of a Year 1 exhibition: https://teesvalleymuseums.org/case-study/cooks-last-adventure. The class followed the five simple steps in the toolkit, but scaled to Key Stage 1 learning. They developed stories, made objects, wrote simple labels and acted as Explainers and Guides in the exhibition. As a result of this Museum in Your Classroom, the school achieved a Historic England Heritage Schools award and has recently become a Champion Heritage School, one of eight nationally...