How often do you see teenagers this eager and engaged in a museum or gallery? I hope your answer is all the time, but we often see that today’s young ‘digital natives’ find it increasingly difficult to connect with history or art and regard galleries as rather uninteresting places.
Find Education includes visits to major art galleries and museums in their immersive cultural activity programmes. Accompanied by their teachers, the students are given an interactive quiz or worksheet to make sure they make the most of their excursion and use the English language skills learnt in the classroom.
Our list of interactive lesson locations has grown to include the following locations:
The British Museum - London
The National Gallery - London
Science Museum - London
Natural History Museum - London
Tate Modern - London
The Ashmolean Museum - Oxford
The students are encouraged to ask for help from the museum’s staff if necessary, and it is lovely to see quite a few of them chatting to room guards, not only using their reading comprehension skills but engaging in conversation.
The out-and-about lessons also present fantastic opportunities in the classroom for discussion, focused language work and skill based activities.
"While visiting the National Gallery, the British Museum or the Natural History Museum, students are free to explore and can find out about interesting facts by themselves guided by a quiz or task sheet. Most of our students love the idea of a scavenger hunt during the out-and-about lesson: usually they have clues to guide them and will later need to take a selfie of the solution. This gives them some time to go around the museum and learn something independently, taking in all the sights and sounds."
Eleonora Puglisi
The interactive out-and-about lessons can be beautifully integrated into the end-of-course presentation where students have a great chance to collaborate and present their UK culture related posters, role-play, drama and PowerPoint presentations to their group leaders and peers.
In our last British Council inspection report (2019), it was listed as a particular strength that we include out-and-about English lessons in most of our summer activity programmes which help our students to 'develop their language skills outside the classroom and benefit linguistically from their stay in the UK'.