History Museums - Educational Programs

Overview:

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:

1. pre-visit materials created by museum educators to prepare students for visiting the museum

2. post-visit materials created by museum educators as a follow up to field trips

3. lessons created by classroom teachers on topics the students are studying

4. 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.

Museums

Adirondack Museum

Project Title: Field Trip Resources - Adirondack Museum

The Adirondack Museum is an "open air" museum depicting life in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. The museum is located at Blue Mountain Lake, New York, and is noted for exhibits, activities, and artifacts that bring history to life. The museum carefully preserves the stories of the Adirondacks for future generations through research, collections, and classes. It offers special events, permanent exhibits, online exhibits, online resources, and educational programs for teaching and learning.

Education specialists offer programs for schools which include:

1. Lumberjack life

2. Journeys through the Great North Woods

3. Adventures in Wilderness

4. Early Reflections of the Adirondacks

5. Others . . .

Pre and post field trip materials are available for teachers and students. The information is assembled for:

1. museum educational staff visiting classrooms

2. teachers and students visiting the museum

Pre and post field trip materials include:

1. Adirondack Advocates - designed to complement the museum's outreach program about the political history behind the park's formation

2. Fur Traders and Bounty Hunters - designed to complement the 60 minute museum outreach program to illustrate the historic significance of hunting and trapping in the Adirondacks.

Sample online exhibits include:

1. Adirondack Rustic Furniture - Nature's Art 1876-1950

2. Common Threads - 150 Years Of Adirondack Quilts and Comforters

Sample permanent exhibits include:

1. Origins Of The Adirondack Museum

2. Daily Life and Work

3. Historic Structures of the Adirondacks

4. Transportation Collections

5. Library and Research

6. Featured Collections

7. Adirondack Journal

Old Sturbridge Village