Activity Quest: Days out and crafts for kids

Adam is standing next to a ten foot tiger, holding out a piece of beef on the end of a stick. This is West Midlands Safari Park in Worcestershire, and it turns out you can do this.
Shona from the park shows him round first. There is a four mile drive-through safari where you stay in your car and feed the hoofed animals through the window, a walk-through area with red pandas, penguins, reptiles and bats, a wood full of ring-tailed lemurs that wander around your feet, an African village and a theme park.
Then Rachel, one of the VIP guides, introduces Ben, a white Bengal tiger who was hand-raised and chuffs when he is happy to see you, and Hujan, a Sumatran tiger who is not remotely interested in people and would just like the food please. A male tiger eats around seven kilograms of meat a day and weighs about the same as ten ten-year-olds.
There is quieter work going on too. The park runs European breeding programmes, with a studbook keeper matching pairs across zoos so the captive populations stay genetically healthy, and it manages its own grassland, woodland and ponds for British wildlife: mallards, crows, bumblebees, butterflies.
Over winter the park opens Friday to Sunday, and daily for the Santa Safari. Book online in advance and you get a free return ticket, and the tip from the team is to do the walk-through areas first thing while the safari road is quiet.
Find out more by searching for West Midlands Safari Park.
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Adam is standing outside a public toilet next to the Monument in the City of London. Except it isn't a toilet any more... It's the Monument Micro Museum, a brand new museum all about the Great Fire of London, and it might just be the smallest museum in the world.
Will, who spent three years making it, shows Adam round. Inside there's a flame exhibition and a giant map where a tiny spark grows and spreads across the city, telling the story of the three days in 1666 when most of the City of London burnt down. City of London guide David Harry, better known as The London Spy, explains why this corner of London is so old, from Roman Londinium to the Emperor Claudius bringing elephants across the sea. And there's a surprise: a secret laboratory hidden under the Monument, built by Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke so they could look up at the stars!
PLUS: Bex and Dan follow the clues to Pudding Lane in a taste of our free Time Hunters walk around the City of London, and meet a baker who swears the fire wasn't his fault.
The Monument Micro Museum is free and open every day from 10am to 5.30pm. Find out more by searching for Monument Micro Museum.
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Adam climbs a narrow spiral staircase, fifty-two steps of it, into the roof of an old church by London Bridge. Up there is the oldest surviving operating theatre in Europe...
It was built in 1822, in the attic where the hospital apothecaries had been drying their herbs, because the space sat right next to the women's ward and had a big skylight to operate under. It closed in 1862 when the hospital moved, was boarded up, and nobody set foot in it again until a researcher found it in 1956. Adam meets Dr Monica Walker for a look at how surgery worked before anaesthetic and before anyone knew about germs, which is not for the faint-hearted. Next door the Herb Garret is still full of the plants they used as medicine.
It is open Thursday to Sunday, 10.30am to 5pm, with last entry at 4.15pm. The spiral staircase is the usual way in, but there is an accessible entrance if you ring ahead.
Find out more by searching for the Old Operating Theatre Museum.
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Adam is in Bloomsbury this week, at the Grant Museum of Zoology. It is part of University College London, it is one room, and that room is packed floor to ceiling with skeletons, jars and glass cases...
It is one of the few university zoology museums left in the country, which means the collection was put together to teach with rather than to show off, and it still feels like that. There is a famous jar of moles, which is exactly what it sounds like. There is a free audio tour with ten stops if you want the stories behind the specimens, and a shop selling 3D-printed bones.
Best of all, it is free to get in. It is open Tuesday to Saturday, one o'clock until five, and it is a couple of minutes' walk from Euston Square.
Find out more by searching for the Grant Museum of Zoology.
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Bex heads to the Postal Museum in Clerkenwell, and then underneath it. Mail Rail is a tiny railway built to carry post across London, running in tunnels below the streets since the 1920s, and you get to ride through the original tunnels on a train that runs on the same track...
Up above, the museum tells the story of the post itself, and there is Sorted!, an indoor play space for children aged one to eight. A ticket covers the Mail Rail ride and a full year of entry to the museum. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, with the last ride down at 4pm.
PLUS: a trip to the Royal Observatory Greenwich to find out exactly what is going on during a partial solar eclipse.
Find out more by searching for the Postal Museum.
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