Has your class visited a museum dedicated to history? Have you learned about life in the past by walking through original or re-created homes, farms, blacksmith shops, old logging camps, railroad cars? Did you visit with costumed historians or interpreters? Have you heard stories or tales about people who used to live and work in your area? Did you learn about the way people earned their livings, dressed, interacted with their environments, traveled? Did you see artifacts, photographs, old maps, diaries, or journals the museums have preserved from earlier times?
Perhaps you've visited museums such as the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mt. Lake, NY or
Old Sturbridge Village in Sturbridge, MA.
This page focuses on projects museum staff, teachers, and students have done.
The projects can be:
- pre-visit materials created by museum educators to prepare students for visiting the museum
- post-visit materials created by museum educators as a follow up to field trips
- lessons created by classroom teachers on topics the students are studying
- projects students do as post field trip activities that summarize what they have learned
Museum staff can create materials with "pre-visit" information. This could include objectives, pre-visit activities, terms students will hear during their visit, important vocabulary, and links to other resources on the WEB for students to study. They can also do post-visit surveys to determine the effectiveness of the museum's programs.
Teachers can create lessons to introduce students to the history topics they are studying. For example, they could create presentation slide shows, with pictures and text, in Google Presentation. Or, have students take a virtual field trip using Google Earth or Maps so that students have visual representations about the museums and buildings they will be visiting. They can create surveys and quizzes using Forms, documents with hyperlinks for student webquests or learning activities.
Students can create projects, after they have visited the museums, listened to interpreters, handles primary source artifacts, to demonstrate what they have learned. Students can be put in pairs or groups for collaborative projects and peer-to-peer learning activities. They can use clusters of Google tools for their projects.
If your school has done a project based on a visit to a museum, consider doing a project for others to discover and learn from. Teachers can post teaching lessons. Students can post projects. Museum staff can post pre and post visit materials.
Exemplars:
The following museums or schools were the first to take part in this project. Please study their formats as models for your own projects:
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| Project Title: Learning Materials for School Field Trips |
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The Adirondack Museum, located in Blue Mt. Lake, NY, prepares pre & post visit materials for teachers and students. The information is assembled for:
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| Project Title: Educational Resources At Old Sturbridge Village |
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| Old Sturbridge Village is a re-created village, depicting life in the 1830's, with over 40 antique homes, buildings, and water powered mills. There are "hands on" educational programs where students can study primary sources, talk to historians in time period clothing, and experience life as it was in the early 19th Century. Or, costumed historians can visit classrooms, offering special programs.
See sample resources and programs OSV offers on its website as part of their educational program. Resources include:
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| Coming Soon: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
History Museums - Educational Programs