Stay home: explore ideas, skills and future careers!

From penguin-cams to ballet, and 360-degree tours to live plays, there’s plenty to explore while we all need to stay at home. Check out these fun home activities that can you keep up with the curriculum and get you thinking of your future career, while having a good time!

by Anna Christodoulou, Collaborative Outreach Officer, Make Happen 

Visit any University in the country without leaving home
Uni Taster Days are offer a broad range of virtual university tours, online Open Days, “meet and greet” sessions with University academics and student Ambassadors, and discussions on how to choose a course and skills sessions – from doing a UCAS application to enhancing your interview techniques. There are 133 online events scheduled so far and there are more to come after Easter!

Explore skills and careers at home
If you’d like to have an initial careers discussion at home, this practical guide from Youth Employment UK (pdf) is full of ideas and fun activities like Buzz, the popular career personality quiz.

A zooniverse of ideas
Take part in real research from your living room. This website enables everyone to take part in real cutting-edge research in many fields across the sciences, humanities, and more. This is your chance to unlock answers and contribute to real discoveries!

Bringing the zoo to you
Colchester Zoo is doing regular posts about its animals in social media, under the #BringingTheZooToYou hashtag. Their photos and videos are breathtaking, like the amur tiger cub getting really close or the training of Caroline, the crocodile! They have also put together a set of excellent wildlife activities to do at home (pdf), plenty of which have strong curriculum links, like food chains or extinction timelines. Also, if you would like to watch to zoo animals through webcams, the Edinburgh zoo has webcams for pandas, penguins, koalas and tigers. Penguins are the stars of the penguincam online show, happily moving around (and occasionally trying to eat the webcam!).

English National Ballet at home
English National Ballet is providing home lessons for professional dancers – get a glimpse of what prep looks like for a ballet star or take a class for all levels with world acclaimed artists.

Enjoy theatre at home from National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe
National Theatre live streams a new show every Thursday on Youtube and similarly The Royal Shakespeare Company is streaming on Saturdays from their channel and they also have a wide collection of online resources at their Shakespeare learning zone, as well as live lessons on Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. Finally, the Globe is also offering six plays on stream and will also be enhancing your children’s language skills by making available their 2012 Globe to Globe festival, which welcomed artists from all over the globe to perform Shakespeare’s works in their own language.

British Museum
Explore all the treasures inside the British Museum online

British Museum (and others) at Home
What’s the world’s largest indoor space on Google Street View? It’s the British Museum! More than 60 galleries are on offer, and in this virtual tour there is no one between you in and the Rosetta stone, as the footage has been taken when the museum was empty. There are lots to explore beyond the galleries though – a podcast and lots of fun resources are available too, to enhance your visit. If you’d rather visit a museum in a different country, see this list – including the Louvre in Paris, France which is offering free online tours of some of its galleries, including Egyptian antiquities, while the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington USA, is offering incredible 360 degrees room-by-room tours of every exhibit!

Work for a CREST Award from home
The CREST Awards from the British Science Association are still on – why not try and design a set of activities and claim them? They have lots of ideas in their website but you can also pursue a STEM project you have come up with.

Online concerts from the Royal Albert Hall
Royal Albert Hall opens its virtual doors and a programme of exclusive shows direct from artists’ living rooms.

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"There's plenty to explore while we all need to stay at home."