Language Schools
The National Museum of Ireland-Archaeology, is a popular choice of venue for Language Schools, where students can discover some of the most important Celtic and pre-Celtic artefacts in the world.
Our collections, which range from 4500 BC to AD 1500, include Bronze Age gold, Iron Age bog bodies and Early Christian treasures.
Advice on visiting and planning a visit
A) Groups must book in advance for any type of visit to the Museum by emailing Bookings.
B) We are unable to provide guided tours for Language Schools so all visits are self directed. Please note that the Group Leader is asked to remain with the group at all times and we recommend the ratio of leaders to students is 1 to 15.
C) In order to ensure your visit is comfortable and enjoyable it is advisible to follow the steps below:
• Teachers/group leaders should gather their group together before they enter the building;
• The teacher/group leader advises staff at the reception desk of their arrival and proceeds to bring the group into the main exhibition space;
• The group leaves their bags and coats on the bus.
We recommend that all groups who are on a self-directed visit do some preparatory work, have tasks to complete during their visit and do post-visit work on return to the classroom.
Pre-visit preparation
Students will discover there are many nouns and verbs in the Museum exhibitions such as hoard, bog or alloying, which they might not have covered in their normal English classes.
One pre-visit task could be that the students could create their own glossary for their visit.
Setting Tasks
The Museum floorplan and guidebook below gives information which should assist in planning a route or task for the students visit.
Setting a task will help the students concentrate and benefit from the visit, such as sketching their favorite object, listing finds from Irish bogs and discovering reasons for deposition and preservation or locating an object from a chosen Irish county and writing a descriptive ‘Museum label’ for the object.
Students could also try one of our activity sheets below:
Resources for Language Schools
Activity books:
Download and print the activity books before your visit or pick some up when you arrive:
My Favourite Object Activity Sheet (English) My Favourite Object Eng WEB2.pdf (0.11 MB, Adobe PDF)
Stone Age EN Stone Age English WEB.pdf (1.15 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Treasure Trail TreasureTrail.pdf (0.52 MB, Adobe PDF)
- NMI-VikingActivity7Oct2011eng NMI-VikingActivity7Oct2011eng.pdf (0.92 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Viking Activity Sheet Viking Special Needs.pdf (1.96 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Ancient Egyptian Activity Sheet Ancient Egyptian Activity Sheet.pdf (1.04 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Everything You Wanted to Know About Mummies Everything you never wanted to know about Mummies.pdf (0.79 MB, Adobe PDF)
- So You Want To Be A Mummy So you want to be a Mummy 1.pdf (0.66 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS1 Power Medieval Ireland-AS1 Power.pdf (1.04 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS2 Power Medieval Ireland-AS2 Power.pdf (0.85 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS3 Work Medieval Ireland-AS3 Work.pdf (1.55 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS4 Work Medieval Ireland-AS4 Work.pdf (2.23 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS5 Prayer Medieval Ireland-AS5 Prayer.pdf (1.12 MB, Adobe PDF)
- Medieval Ireland AS6 Prayer Medieval Ireland-AS6 Prayer.pdf (1.28 MB, Adobe PDF)
- NMI winter trail NMI winter trail Web.pdf (2.10 MB, Adobe PDF)
Download a floorplan:
Download our Museum guidebook:
Have some follow-up work planned for back in the classroom. After their visit students could:
- write a story about what it would be like to find an ancient treasure.
- describe their favourite Irish artefact.
- write a fictional short story about life in a different historic period.
- use the Museum website to find out more about an exhibition they liked and describe it in a presentation.
The exhibition pages contain information about the key developments and objects in a range of time periods.
There is information on part of the research collection which is not on display on the collections pages.