The Living Heritage Museum offers lesson plans and activities that have been developed to further enhance your Museum visit as well as work effectively as stand-alone classroom activities.
Pre Field Trip & Post Field Trip Activities: To make the most of your field trip and reinforce what your students will learn, there are connected activities you can do before, during, and after the field trip.
How to Read a Photograph: Period photographs, along with other primary source documents, are engaging tools that should become an important part of any educational experience.
Artifact Exploration Guide: Bringing artifacts into the classroom serves several valuable purposes. A carefully chosen artifact can provide information about the historical period or cultural context in which a work of literature was produced or set and is a great way to engage students in active learning.
My Backyard History: There is a lot more to history than memorizing names of presidents and dates of wars, and most of it has to do with people who are alive right now. History starts with what you had for breakfast this morning and leads to a celebration of the passage of time. In between, there is a lot of interesting territory.
Living History: Using the Museum's Exhibits--COMING SOON!: Each Living Legacy Lesson Plan features a particular museum exhibit and offers activities suitable ongoing exploration of exhibit themes.
Where's Abbie?: The Where’s Abbie Project provides an opportunity for students to make connections with other students who participate in the project. Students make a Paper Abbie and keep a journal for a few days, documenting the places and activities in which Paper Abbie is involved as she would see it as a visitor from the 18th century. Paper Abbie and the journal are mailed to other people who are asked to treat the figure as a visiting guest and add to her journal, then return them both after a period of time. The project has many similarities to the Traveling Gnome prank except, of course, for the Paper Abbie Project's focus on history. Students may find it fun to plot Paper Abbie’s travels on maps and share the contents of the journal.
Primary Resources--COMING SOON!: A primary source allows students to investigate a subject by reading and analyzing that source, grappling with its meanings, and attempting to interpret it and place it in its historical context.
