Take your learners beyond the classroom and into a world of discovery with the KwaZulu-Natal Museum’s engaging, CAPS-aligned educational offerings. Our hands-on lessons are designed to deepen understanding through real-world experiences, complete with experiments, video presentations, authentic specimens and artefacts, and guided gallery tours.

Here’s what we have in store for Term 2:

🔍 Formal Lessons
Our in-house lessons make use of fascinating specimens, interactive gallery tours, and learner-friendly resources like notes and worksheets. It’s a great way to bring textbook topics to life.

🚐 Sabalala Nolwazi (Outreach Programme)
Can’t make it to the Museum? We’ll come to you! Our outreach team offers curriculum enrichment lessons for Grades 4–7 in both Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, right at your school.

🏛️ A Day at the Museum
Take a journey through history with this immersive experience that includes educational presentations, DVD screenings, and a guided tour of the Museum’s Freedom Gallery. Perfectly aligned with grade-specific history topics, this program helps learners understand the significance of historical events in a meaningful way.

Interested in booking an educational experience with us?
📞 Call us on 033 345 1404 or
📧 Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to find out more or to make a booking.

Let’s turn learning into an unforgettable adventure!

The KZN Museum’s Exhibitions Department recently welcomed first-year Digital Arts students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) for an inspiring talk as part of their Digital Theory module.

The session focused on the fascinating world of the magic lantern, a 17th-century invention that used light and lenses to project hand-painted images onto walls and screens. Long before movies and virtual reality, this device dazzled audiences with incredible visual displays that combined storytelling, science, and optical illusions.

Students learned how the magic lantern was used in everything from ghostly phantasmagoria shows that “summoned spirits” in dark, smoky rooms to beautifully detailed slides that brought far-off lands, fairy tales, and scientific concepts to life.

Far from being just a quirky historical gadget, the magic lantern played a major role in shaping the way we experience visual media today. It laid the foundation for cinema, animation, immersive theatre, and even today’s AR and VR technologies.

At its core, the magic lantern demonstrated the power of combining light, movement, and emotion to tell stories, an approach that continues to shape how we connect with content on every screen we watch.

This engaging session gave students a glimpse into the past, while also highlighting just how deeply those early innovations continue to influence the future of digital art and design.