Get Kids Out Learning at Fairlynch

https://tutora.co.uk/get-kids-out-learning

Fairlynch has teamed up with an educational organization which we hope will result in more children visiting the Museum, making an afternoon at Fairlynch a truly enriching family experience. And it still costs nothing!  

‘Get Kids Out Learning is an easy way for families to find fun days out local to them, but which still provide great learning and educational opportunities for the kids,’ says CEO Scott Woodley, a former primary school teacher who founded the organisation. 

‘Our website pulls together all of the best educational venues across the UK and allows parents to search for them by region to quickly see all the information they need to plan a great day out!’

Locally, Get Kids Out Learning has teamed up with places like the World of Country Life and Coldharbour Mill; bigger names in the partnership include St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire and Leeds Castle in Kent.  

Seven-year-old Minnie, riding on Phoenix in our Costume Room and featured on the front cover of the autumn edition of The Primrose. A regular visitor to Budleigh, Minnie is very interested in history, and loves Fairlynch. Especially the dressing-up box.

The Museum’s latest partnership coincides with an editorial in its magazine The Primrose stressing Fairlynch’s role as a place of education.  

Children from Awliscombe Primary School, near Honiton, discover the dressing-up box in Fairlynch Museum's Costume Room

For the Museum’s founders it seems that education was viewed as one of its major functions. An article in the Exmouth Journal of 8 June 1968 observed that the current Exhibition Room was ‘given over to the use of local schools to stage various projects’.  The article noted that the first to take advantage of this facility were the children of Otterton Primary School, who presented the story of wool and its many stages.

Legendary Budleigh Salterton teacher Miss Bannister with her 1973 class  

It seems that the original plan for a schoolroom at the Museum did not survive — Miss Bannister’s school in the Linhay was a rather different and much later project.  But Fairlynch has certainly continued to see education as an important role.

The latest edition of The Primrose has a range of articles on the theme of education. There’s a piece  about the continuing success of Fairlynch’s Angela and Tony Colmer Bursary awarded to Exeter University archaeology students, now in its fourth year.

We also publish a feature on research into Roman Devon carried out by Nottingham University student Bryony Goodesmith, seen above, a project on which she received help from Fairlynch.   

Children from St Peter's Church of England  Primary School learn about our Bronze Age ancestors from a Fairlynch Archaeology display

Museum visits, as the Museums Association put it in a recent article, are ‘an inimitable way of encouraging children to learn and to enjoy learning, especially compared to formal schooling.’  Our recent ‘Kids Curate’ project was a novel and entertaining experience for children from St Peter’s CofE School in Budleigh Salterton.

Children from that school’s Beech Class equally enjoyed this summer meeting Admiral Preedy’s sailor ‘Isaac’ – played by professional storyteller Steve Manning. They learnt about 19th century seafaring and the challenges involved in laying the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable.

In 2000, when Sir John Everett Millais’s ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ was last exhibited at Fairlynch, children from Drake’s School in East Budleigh made a special visit to admire the celebrated painting; we hope that they will make a return visit in 2018, the 400th anniversary of the death of their village’s best known former resident.  

Above: a panel from Fairlynch's Sir Walter Ralegh Room

At St Peter’s School, Lympstone, their specially designed baccalaureate includes a section on Native American Indians: pupils will be able to study the 16th century tribal artefacts on loan from Bristol Museum and Art Gallery which we have exhibited in our Sir Walter Ralegh Room.  

Study of the life and character of the Great Elizabethan is an educational experience in itself. Yet in an age of so-called political correctnesss when so many great national figures have been toppled from their pedestals you could well ask whether the notion of heroes has a place in the classroom.  

Three of our Fairlynch Trustees are former teachers. If you have an interest in education please consider joining our team to make our children’s museum visits

even more enjoyable and beneficial.

To find out more about Get Kids Out Learning click on the website at https://tutora.co.uk/get-kids-out-learning