Making a Classroom Museum

Making a classroom museum is an ideal cross-curricular project, culminating in a learning display in your school. Linking into many of the Curriculum for Excellence themes, and generating excitement from pupils, a classroom museum can be carried out successfully with all stages from early years to upper Secondary.

Our Museums Education Officer post is currently vacant so at present we are unable to offer our Classroom Museum programme.

For loan boxes please email elms@eastlothian.gov.uk and someone will get back to you within 2 weeks.

For visits to our museums, please contact the relevant museum via their contact details

Museum Curators in Training!

Suitable for: P1-S6, FREE (for EL schools)

Up to 2 hours, delivered in your school classroom

Are you looking for a new way of creating a learning display? Make your own classroom museum, with support from us, and discover what really goes on behind the scenes in museums! In this workshop, your class will learn skills such as writing museum labels, planning displays and studying objects as we plan how to create a museum in your school. Adaptable to any subject, this workshop is hugely popular and also involves a post-workshop visit when your museum opens! Additional support materials for teachers also included.

Musselburgh Burgh’s Egyptian Museum

Download a lesson plan below:

Lesson Outline for Making a Classroom Museum Workshop

CPD Sessions for Teachers

We also run CPD sessions focussing on this topic throughout the year.

Online Resources

To get you started, please look at the following handouts:

Tips for Laying Out a Classroom Museum – To help you get started with thinking about how you can turn your classroom space into a museum.

Museum Object Record Sheet – If your class are going to borrow objects from their parents, friends or family, as well as the local community, you can use this sheet to record details of each object.

Jobs in Museums for Pupils – A little insight into all the different jobs there are in museums (you can have lots of fun with pupils applying to take up each post!)

Photos of Setting up a Classroom Museum – Images and tips from other classroom museums that you could use with your class to aid discussion about making a museum

Museum_Curator_stickers – Stickers you can print out for your class saying ‘Museum Curator’

Advertising Our Museum – If you gather a wide range of leaflets from different visitor attractions, then you can use this worksheet to analyse them, or it could assist with leading a discussion with younger classes

Museum Object sheet P7s – Adapt this worksheet to suit your classes, but it captures some of the basic details we would collect about objects when they enter our museums

Studying Objects for P1.2 – A worksheet for younger classes to encourage them to use all their senses to explore objects (apart from taste!)

Writing a Label – Worksheet to help with writing a label for the objects in your classroom museum. For younger classes, you could encourage them to write a title giving the name of their object, draw the object, then write a sentence or two about it.

Classroom Museum Powerpoint for Teachers – PDF version of a powerpoint used in teachers CPD sessions, alongside the resources above