The Museum uses its range of expertise and wide variety of specimens to promote the Life Sciences to communities outside the King’s College through Open Days and especially to local schools through a series of workshops.
Outreach to schools
The workshops offer hands-on experiences of some of the museum specimens. Subjects offered at GCSE level include biodiversity and evolution, limbs and locomotion, insects and pollination. At A level, topics include teeth their evolution and care and also primates and the emergence of man. Lively discussions are part of the Museum visit and pupils enjoy the opportunity to handle real specimens.
Workshops take place on certain Thursday afternoons and are arranged through schools. As space in the Museum is limited, we take up to 16 attendees for any one workshop. This allows work in small groups and enables everyone to have the opportunity to interact with the specimens.
Outreach to the wider community
The Museum is visited by potential students and their parents on college recruitment open days and by other groups through arrangement. There is generally an open day each year for the general public. These have a particular theme and include activities for children.
A novel venture for the museum some years ago was involvement in a local community scheme to produce a temporary urban ‘Pop-up’ Physic Garden in a derelict site near to the Guy’s Campus of King’s College. Photographs of some of the Museum’s Pharmacy Herbarium specimens were Included in the garden.
Opening of the museum during the Open House Festival is an annual event. The Museum is open to the general public for one or two days during the September festival period. Visitors are interested in the architecture as well as the specimens.
A small group of artists regularly comes to the museum to depict specimens in different media and individual artists come for specific purposes by arrangement.