Extending the Play

Creating the museum for a purpose will offer children a heightened responsibility to develop their collaborative and creative skills. By inviting visitors such as parents and carers to the museum, children will have a common goal to work towards.

Why not take this opportunity to stand back and observe the skills the children have developed including oracy, communication and collaborative skills?

You could make the experience more realistic for the children by swapping out the café play food for a drink of squash and a biscuit for example. A real shop of children’s craft creations could also create opportunities to use real money with adult support.

Now that the hard work has been done to establish a museum in your class, it is important to keep the museum as interesting and exciting as possible by introducing different scenarios at regular intervals. Below are some ideas that could be introduced to the class.

• An object has gone missing from the museum or has been broken. Can the children identify the object, draw a picture, and label it for a report to find or replace it?
• As a class topic changes, it might be worth changing the whole collection of objects that the children can put on display.
• What happens to the objects in the museum at night? create stories about how they come to life.