In These Times

• National Museums NI have announced a phased reopening of their museums with free tickets and time slots now required to be booked online – details will be on their website shortly; the Ulster Museum will reopen from 30th July (Tuesday - Sunday), the Ulster American Folk Park and Ulster Folk Museum from 13th August (Thursday – Sunday)and the Ulster Transport Museum 20th August (Thursday – Sunday)
• In the year that the BBC Proms turns 125 years old with these challenging times, the BBC will still be holding its annual festival with live archive concerts available live and in the final 2 weeks of the season, live performances from the Royal Albert Hall will be streamed. The season launches Friday 17 July with a performance by the specially created BBC Grand Virtual Orchestra, comprising over 350 musicians from the BBC Orchestras and Choirs. They will perform a completely original arrangement of Beethoven’s 9 symphonies, created by Iain Farrington who describes his work as “taking Beethoven's music and putting it in a musical washing machine to see which colours run”.
• the National Garden Scheme, which gives visitors access to over 3,700 private gardens in England and Wales, has put together nearly 200 virtual garden visits of their gardens which can be viewed on their website - link here

For children/grandchildren

• some lovely storytelling and activities can be found on the Young Explorers Page of the Pitlochry Festival website; in particular Giraffes Can't Dance and The Tiger who came to Tea are illustrated and have sound effects - link here
• BBC's Science Focus magazine describes 2 amazingly easy indoor food experiments for trying out out with children - growing vegetables from food scraps, and watching mould grow in a hand print on a slice of bread - link here

previously

• YouthAction NI YouthAction NI have launched their latest resource - ‘Turn the Light on’. Their vision is to support young people to be healthy, happy and hopeful and while much focus of youth work has been on mental health and well-being, they realise young people also need better information and understanding in relation to sexual health and relationships. Sexual health and relationship choices and behaviours are often interconnected with mental health. Turn the light on is their new Relationship and Sexuality Education resource which will support youth workers to open up conversations about sexual health in which young people can discuss and explore attitudes about a range of relationship, sexuality and sexual health themes. This new resource brings together practical workshop ideas to help workers to introduce important topics on Healthy Relationships, Consent, STIs and Sexuality.  Click on image to read document
• with theatres not set to open for some time they continue to stream past performances - this week's plays are: