The museum's Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life explores the diverse, complex web of life supported by the ocean and the vital inter-relationships between human and aquatic systems. This insert to the hall guide is designed to help you maximize your trip to the museum.
In this classroom activity, young students compare their feet to the foot of a large Apatosaur. The activity opens with background information for teachers about the enormous size range of dinosaurs. After using personal references to describe the size of dinosaurs, students examine the outline of an Apatosaur footprint. Students then estimate how many of their footprints would fit inside the Apatosaur footprint and conduct an experiment to test their estimate.
What happens when asteroids head for Earth? Most don't make it through the atmosphere. This comic strip, a supplement to the Hall of Meteorites Educator's Guide, uses detailed cross-section drawings to show what happens when one does.
With this interactive, students examine various types of volcanoes.
In this interview, Mark Siddall talks about his work as an invertebrate systematist and how marine organisms eat. Using a question and answer format, information is presented on the feeding habits, behaviors and strategies of various types of marine animals.
This fun Web site is part of OLogy, where kids can collect virtual trading cards and create projects with them. Here, they take a close-up look at biodiversity in a city park. The site opens by telling kids that, despite appearances, a great deal of biodiversity exists in cities. From tiny mites to mighty trees, thousands of species thrive there. It then takes them to a slice of life from a thriving city park, where they are asked to find 10 hidden critters living alongside the trees, plants, and insects. Each time they locate one of the tiny critters, they are rewarded with a quick look at its importance to the habitat.
Did you know that when you look at a star, your eyes are capturing light that traveled all the way from the star to your eye? Learn more about how light carries information from distant objects. This Moveable Museum article, available as a nine-page printable PDF file, offers a kid-friendly look at how information about distant objects comes to us in the form of light. It includes suggested resources for further research.
This classroom activity, which centers on documenting the location of a meteorite in Antarctica, introduces students to the technology of Global Positioning Systems. The printable handout includes a series of inquiry-based questions to get students thinking about the challenges of marking exact positions in an area where the landscape is continually changing, illustrated activity directions and a worksheet that guides students through the way satellites are used in GPS and includes areas for recording their findings.
Students learn about the subjective value of objects in this Moveable Museum lesson plan by "interpreting" each other's important cultural artifacts. The 11-page PDF guide has educator materials with background information, teacher strategies, assessment guidelines, and detailed notes about the curriculum standards addressed.
This OLogy activity provides insight into the phases of the Moon and why it looks a little different each night. The activity begins with an explanation about how the Moon itself doesn't really change, just our view of it. Then kids go to "See the Moon in Action," an interactive illustration of the Moon's orbit around the Earth, in which they can see what the Moon looks like from Earth at eight different positions in its orbit. The activity ends with a Moon Watch Log, a printable PDF file, that kids use to observe the Moon for 28 nights and then compile their illustrations into a flipbook.
In this classroom activity, students cut apart a plastic soda bottle and create a planar (polar) and a cylindrical (Mercator) projection to understand the challenges of creating maps of the Earth. The printable handout includes a series of inquiry-based questions to get students thinking about the challenges of mapping a spherical object like the Earth, detailed activity directions and a worksheet that helps students use the activity results to understand how polar and Mercator projections are created and how both distort their subjects.
In this Digital Universe activity, students learn about observation, representation, perspective, and modeling by working up from two-dimensional perspective drawings to constructing and examining three-dimensional models. The printable PDF activity includes illustrated step-by-step instructions for the following hands-on and computer-assisted activities: Rendering Perspective in Two Dimensions and Creating a Three-Dimensional View. The American Museum of Natural History's "Digital Universe" program, including the Partiview software and Milky Way Atlas data set are needed for this activity and can be downloaded.
After researching the characteristics of arthropods, students observe arthropods in the field, analyze their data, and learn how to develop their own arthropod collection. The unit is designed to be completed in eight or more sessions. The comprehensive curriculum materials contain information for teachers, including activity tips and an overview of the characteristics that define arthropods.
In this extensive Smithsonian National Youth Summit conversation kit filled with links, lessons, activities, interviews, and more, students will be immersed in the history of American abolition and consider these guiding questions: 1. How did abolitionists work to end slavery in the 19th-century? 2. How are today’s activists using the tactics of the 19th-century to continue the fight against human trafficking and
modern-day slavery? and 3. What can individuals and organizations do to end modern-day slavery?
In this extensive Smithsonian National Youth Summit toolkit filled with links, lessons, activities, interviews, and more, students will be immersed in the history of Freedom Summer and consider these guiding questions: 1. What are the lessons of Freedom Summer for today’s world? 2. Is Freedom Summer a template for social change? and 3. What can or cannot be achieved at the grassroots level?
This online database of our North American Ethnographic collection includes artifacts from every Native American cultural region in North America, from Achomawi and Acoma to Zia and Zuni. The database allows you to see all artifacts for a specific culture, search by object type, material, locale, and donor, find out what items are currently on display and learn about recently acquired artifacts. There are two ways to search the collection as a picture-only gallery, or as a catalog that describes each artifact's provenance (country, locale, culture), materials, dimensions, and year of acquisition.
Students learn about parallax in this Moveable Museum unit, in which they use mathematical techniques related to parallax to calculate the height of an object. The eight-page PDF guide includes suggested general background readings for educators, activity notes, step-by-step directions, a Data Sheet and a Tangent Table, and an astrolabe template.
In this Digital Universe activity, students practice the scientific skills of observation, inference, and modeling and learn about scale, perspective, and distance by building a three-dimensional model of something they usually perceive as two-dimensional. The 11-page printable PDF activity includes illustrated step-by-step instructions for the following hands-on and computer-assisted activities:Introducing the Constellations, Making a Two-Dimensional Constellation Model, Introducing Parallax and Luminosity, Using Parallax and Luminosity, and Viewing Orion in Three Dimensions.
The Passport to the Universe space show reveals the universe's wonders in a way never before possible in a planetarium. This comprehensive guide to the space show is designed to help you maximize your viewing. It includes background information to help you prepare for your planetarium field trip, detailed information about what you'll see before and during the show and suggestions for several pre- and post-visit activities to do with your students. There are notes about how the show addresses performance standards and curriculum requirements.
Students learn about pixels in this Moveable Museum unit, in which they decode a simple digital image from a string of numbers. The eight-page PDF guide includes suggested general background readings for educators, activity notes, step-by-step directions, and activity handouts. There are two versions of the activity, one for Grades K-3 and one for Grades 4-8 Version.