Valentines, Saxons and cockroaches...all in a days work at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery!

I offered to volunteer at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery over the February half term (I say offered, I bombarded one of the ladies, Julia, who works there with tweets and emails!) So a couple of weeks ago it was agreed that I would go and meet with Louise (who is in charge of the educational activities) to discuss what I could do, and what they would like me to help out with. We went on a bit of the tour of the gallery, to the offices and to the learning zone (where most of the children's activities take place). I had been to the learning zone before with my younger cousin on another of the museums activity days.
We agreed that I would volunteer on the Monday, Thursday and Friday of half term. :)
First day went well, I was making valentines cards and love charms with a fabulous artist called Anne Brierly, who gave me loads of info about community art and working at the gallery. The kids created some fab cards (better than I could do!) and made up magic spells to put on the charm for their valentine. Lots of cards were made for Mummy's and Daddy's, very sweet! :)
On Thursday it was a bit of a slower day, it was Anglo-Saxon day across the whole museum, there were visiting Saxon warriors and face painting to have battle scars and the conservation team where there to show kids how they excavate finds (like the Staffordshire hoard) the children go to excavate their own 'treasures' too! :)
On Friday I was expecting to be back in the craft room making thing linked to the Leonardo DaVinci drawings (which are on show at BMAG for the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations) making helicopters and parachutes...oh how wrong could I be!! I was working with the bug zoo from Hatton Country World, the chap that bought the bugs and reptiles was fab and he had the bigger creatures and supervised the kids with them, snakes, tarantulas, lizards, a giant frog! Then there were tables with bugs in tanks, more tarantulas, scorpions, beetles and another table where the kids could hold things, stick insects, cockroaches, giant millipedes and giant snails, this table needed to be supervised and the bugs handed out to the kids...guess who's job this was?!! Yikes! I don't like bugs! I was especially scared of the cockroaches (they move way too fast!!) when a 5 year old kid picked one up no problem I decided I needed to man up!! By the end of the day I was fine picking them up passing them round! I took photos as evidence cos I thought no one would believe me!! All in all I had a fab week and would love to go back again! :)