In the Deep End

Today, for our communicating earth sciences module, we were told to meet at the back of the Plymouth Museum at 9am. When we got in the museum, we looked around for a while, before being told that there was going to be a group of 13 and 14 year old boys coming along for to work with us in groups for the rest of the session. First we were given a rock or fossil - my group had an ammonite - and we had to come up with a descriptive card for it, as if we were writing it for the museum. We were then asked to think of all of the groups of people that would visit the museum, ranging from families, to experts, to school groups. After that we had to write a descriptive card for a specific group - we had higher education students - making sure that the information and language was of a standard that the specific group would be expecting. The final card that we had to do was an overall one for all groups of people, trying to make it engaging, informative and understandable for a wide variety of people.
We then took the students around the university to look at all of the fossils that can be seen in the walls and floors of the buildings. We found quite a few and I think the students found it interesting. Below you can see one of my fellow course mates discussing some of the interesting features in a wall outside Portland Square!

Overall today was enjoyable (despite the fact that we didn't have a clue what we were doing!) and we learned how to teach school age children about geology. Looking forward to seeing what's going to happen to us next time!