1Hello, and thank you for asking me to your teachers' meeting to talk about the Dinosaur Museum
2and to tell you a bit about what you can do with your students there.
3Well, let me give you some of the basic information first.
4In regard to opening hours,
5we're open every day of the week from 9 am to 8 pm
6except on Mondays when we close at 1.30 pm.
7And, in fact the only day in the year when we're closed is on the 25th of December.
8You can book a guided tour for your school group any time that we're open.
9If you bring a school group to the museum,
10when you arrive we ask you to remain with your group in the car park.
11One or more of the tour guides will welcome you there
12and brief you about what the tour will be about.
13We do this there because our entrance is quite small
14and we really haven't got much room for briefing groups in the exhibition area.
15As far as the amount of time you'll need goes,
16if you bring a school group,
17you should plan on allowing a minimum of 90 minutes for the visit.
18This allows 15 minutes to get on and off the coach,
1945 minutes for the guided tour
20and 30 minutes for after-tour activities.
21If you're going to have lunch at the museum,
22you will, of course, have to allow more time.
23There are two cafés in the museum, with seating for 80 people.
24If you want to eat there you'll need to reserve some seating,
25as they can get quite crowded at lunch time.
26Then outside the museum at the back there are tables,
27and students can bring their own lunch and eat it there in the open air.
28When the students come into the museum foyer,
29we ask them to check in their backpacks with their books, lunch boxes, etc, at the cloakroom
30before they enter the museum proper.
31I'm afraid in the past, we have had a few things gone missing after school visits,
32so this is a strict rule.
33Also, some of the exhibits are fragile
34and we don't want them to be accidentally knocked.
35But we do provide school students with handouts with questions and quizzes on them.
36There's so much that students can learn in the museum
37and it's fun for them to have something to do.
38Of course, they'll need to bring something to write with for these.
39We do allow students to take photographs.
40For students who are doing projects
41it's useful to make some kind of visual record of what they see
42that they can add to their reports.
43And finally, they should not bring anything to eat into the museum,
44or drinks of any kind.
45There are also a few things the students can do after the tour.
46In the theatrette on the ground floor,
47there are continuous screenings of short documentaries about dinosaurs which they can see at any time.
48We used to have an activity room with more interactive things like making models of dinosaurs
49and drawing and painting pictures, even hunting for dinosaur eggs,
50but, unfortunately, the room was damaged in a bad storm recently when water came in the roof,
51so that's closed at the moment.
52But we do have an IT centre
53where students have access to CD ROMs with a range of dinosaur games.
54These games are a lot of fun,
55but they also teach the students about the lives of dinosaurs,
56how they found food, protected their habitat, survived threats, that kind of thing.
57And... I think that's all I have to tell you.
58Please feel free to ask any questions if you would like to know anything else...