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: 00 am to 8:00 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.【Q11&12】 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【Q13】 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 【Q14】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 cafes 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,【Q15】 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. 【Q16-18】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.【Q16-18】 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 【Q19&20】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. 【Q19&20】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...