I enjoyed using this resource in class - the students were engaged and we were able to work together easily.

Thank you so much Smithsonian for creating this lesson! Being so close to the Natural History Museum allowed me to take my students into DC and enrich their learning of Rocks, Minerals and the Rock cycle with these excellent lessons that we were able to use before, during and after our trip to the exhibit! Thanks again!

I really enjoyed the information and user-friendliness of this website, and found it to be a useful resource for myself. I do think it would be a lot for one of my students (I work in an ED center) to use though, without careful planning and guiding. All around, beautifully done and informative!

The most valuable aspect of this lesson is the compilation of the primary sources on the presidency.

I used this as a supplemental resource for geology merit badge at Boy Scout Camp. The boys learned about the different types of rocks and formations and when we had extra time, we used this resource. It was a lot of fun for the boys. They competed to see who could get the most correct in the different challenges. They were amazed that they could recognize so many places from Space. I will use this again during the school year as an additional resource for my geography class.

I have a few readers on Squids, and this handout is great to tie together measurement in our math unit to the readers. I wish it were in black and white to make it easier to distribute, but I plan to print one color copy, laminate it, and develop a "squid" learning center to go with my ocean unit.

The concept of this activity is solid. The resource links were no longer usable; however, you could easily substitute current/local information. I would like to see more structure provided to assist students with learning challenges. This could be a pre-made rubric, a vocabulary list, or simpler paraphrases of the Building Background Activity One. Overall, I liked it and will probably use it after making some modifications.

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the online planning your Smithsonian visit resource. I was able to navigate easily and considered it to be very user friendly. The captions and layout although busy provided me everything I needed to explore. As a teacher I was interested in the resources available for field trips which I was able to find. A few suggestions would be to provide the ability to print addresses, calendar of events and the free visitor guide in a text only version. I realize this is an online resource but there are instances when a hard copy is necessary.

We toured the museum and then wrote about our experiences there. Students wrote about some of the aspects of our culture that remain today, but that originally came from the Native Americans. We also took on individual Indian names, and then created stories about how we got our names. Students created borders using designs made of Indian symbols.

Amazingly simple instructions for a do-it-yourself ad campaign on a high school level. Could be adopted easily for other subject matter.

The entire lesson is well organized. Each painting allows for deep conversations about the time period. I did these lessons with my 2nd and 3rd grade class. This works really well if the Guided Language Acquisition Design strategies we use currently to assist our ELL. The questions lend themselves well to ethical questions of race.

This is a great activity for elementary students and for 6th graders to introduce the basics of El Nino. However, for high school usage, it is too basic. I would like to see data collection, graphing, and some calculations involved for a high school lesson plan.

I think this resource could be much much more detailed for older students, but I think it's an ok resource for introducing this topic to younger students. With all the current technology out on the internet now, I was a little surprised to see that a high school student was expected to color in a worksheet without any real learning appearing to occur outside of making a pretty picture. Perhaps if you were to add GIS or something equivalent, then it would be an appropriate lesson for high schoolers. The students I teach would quickly become bored and disengage from this activity before they completed it.

The idea for this project is one that students should enjoy. Each group member should be able to find a role that they would enjoy. While the student prompt was great, the teacher materials were a bit weak. Having a rubric included, instead of suggesting that one be created by the teacher would have been more useful. Most teachers will modify any lesson plan that they find, but they would like more of a starting point. My students would laugh at me if I suggested that they use Yahooligans; maybe a list of websites? The design of the webpage makes reading the lesson difficult; one almost needs to print it from the beginning. I however plan on sharing this with our technology education teacher who loves to do creative projects with her students.

This is a beautiful piece displaying varying Native American arts and cultures. Having studied Inuit and Southwestern Native Americans, the text provides cultural, geographical/environmental and artistic background information. We love this article!

This magazine, plus the supportive book "Small Spirits", is a wonderful resource for a simple and different lesson I use with my 8th grade Visual Art students. They use the text to research and learn a bit about the dolls, then they have to design their own figure and craft it out of clay with any necessary decoration/embellishments. Lastly, they write the story of their kachina doll. I have been doing this lesson every year since the Native American Smithsonian opened.

This lesson plan offers a hands-on approach to 4th and 6th grade social studies curricula. The hands-on application can be extended if you are willing to buy materials at a craft store or write a grant. The lesson plan is well organized and explicit so it can be modified for different populations. Analysis incorporates student learning attributes that have high student achievement correlation.

This was a wonderful resource for my Pre-K Class! The children really enjoyed it and I will use it every year!
Thanks!

Loved this lesson. Very hands on, and a great lesson to activate students prior knowledge. I like the fact that I was able to modify it for the ESL students in the classroom. It was also wonderful that the chart comes in Spanish.

We had fun studying animals & their habitats and this provided an extension to what we were studying as to why animals are designed the way they are.

I liked the lesson plans because it included all grades, it had great visual aids and the website was easy to get into.

What a great lesson plan. Imagine how it could be tied to history, art, women's studies, ecology, economics, even math! (If Lana Turner raised $5.25 mil in 1943, how much ...) Lots and lots of possibilities. How about a WWII week with all teachers working around the theme?

I found this to be a great resource to use in my classroom not only for the visuals but the focus. Too often in the high school classroom, students are quick to judge and state what they would or would not do in a similar situation. This lesson really helped them focus on the information presented to citizens and was a great transition into why we should be civiclly responsible and good stewards of our nation.

Excellent

Students need all the help they can get in putting their ideas and understanding into words that make sense to others. This lesson will help them achieve that goal.

As an educator with the Jewish Museum of Maryland, we spend a good deal of time on Holocaust education. This is a fantastic, primary-source driven, multi-level thinking lesson that is comprehensive and easy to adapt. Because of this lesson, I'd like to add content about Japanese internment during one of our future educator workshops. Thank you for sharing this.

I have used this in a modified form in my classroom and it is wonderful. I put the pictures into a PowerPoint show and read several of the letters and it was powerful for the students to see and hear about this often neglected part of our history! Thank you Smithsonian for providing this in such an easy-to-use format.

Fantastic hands on resource! I used the "Letters from a Japanese Internment Camp" while teaching Farewell to Manzanar. The resource gave the book depth and validity. Thank you!

This site was very helpful for me, I found all of the information that I needed in a matter of minutes. Keep up the good work my fellow Smithsonians!!

This was a great resource for teaching kids how to think and reason like an anthropologist!
Easy to prepare, follow and present!

I have used lesson plan #3 of this resource for several years now. My students love to discover what the "found" objects really are. Each time they are astounding to find that they are simple everyday items.

It is wonderful to have this resource- pair the pictures found here with your teachings on the Wright Brothers!

This is a great way to see the museum without having to travel the long distance. I would not change a thing.

This is a great lesson to review primary and secondary sources. I have used it with 5th graders to talk about how discrepancies exist between different information sources. Terrific!!

I highly recommend this resource. Using common items from the 20th century--Barbie, travel pennants, etc.--sparks discussion and critical thinking in the classroom.

I highly encourage using this resource for your AP classes. I presented this game to my AP class and they were completely engaged the entire time. They raved about it for many days afterward. From my experience it was a huge success.

After reviewing cell biology in class, I gave my freshman biology students the challenge of creating a cell biology game. Only 4 students were willing to try - and that was after much coaxing. The 2 teams (of 2 students each) presented their game designs to the class afterward, and none of the students were able to participate in the game (not able to recall or even guess the answers). The rest of the class focused on technical aspects of creating a video game, right from the beginning of the game design, so valuable class time was lost for all those students. I would only recommend this type of game design for upperclassmen HS students, and only as an extra credit project, instead of taking class time. I believe this type of lesson would be successful in a computer skills class.

Due to their iconic role in the study of color, this exhibition on Josef and Anni Albers is ideal in the classroom. Using Color-Aid paper, the students can develop a personal color palette (showing small square chips of color). Then, using the designs of Josef Albers as inspiration, create a design for a rug that incorporates your personal palette. It can be modified for use with acrylic paint rather than Color-Aid.

I use this lesson with my above-grade level and gifted readers in Grade 4 as a culminating activity after reading George Washington's Socks by Elvira Woodruff, which gives many students their first glimpse of the Revolutionary War. The students get timed admission tickets for the gallery walk to look at the bills, which I hang sequentially, and they take notes on what they notice about the money. The students share their observations, draw conclusions, and pinpoint lingering questions which they want to research. Then the students work with a partner to examine one bill with a magnifying glass to gather clues as to what was happening at the time, what was important to the people in that colony/state, etc. Our discussions are lively and enriching, and my students are thrilled when they discover why there is a break in bills between April and October of 1776! It's truly an "ah- ha" moment!

This is an excellent resource to use with gifted students during a study of the Revolutionary War.
The content is interesting to students who are ready to move beyond the basics and need enrichment beyond the regular curriculum.

The value of using Revolutionary Money in the classroom is three fold: students apply critical thinking skills, learn about primary resources, and connect ideas of propaganda during wartime. There are so many ways to use this resource that I find it's most valuable when I let the student discussion drive the learning.
As students closely examine the money samples, they begin to ask questions, notice unfamiliar words and differences in monetary values. I often find that my students notice small elements that I had forgotten about from previous lessons.
Students can connect their knowledge of modern money to their investigation of the samples of Revolutionary War era money. These are primary sources that students can understand more easily than digesting a letter or other document.
Finally, after learning about the threats on tax collectors and the anger in the colonies during the push for independence - students are quick to see connections in the printed money.
Overall, this is

I love this! My students do a whole unit on the inside of earth, rocks, and minerals. I plan on creating a WebQuest for the students as a introduction to the unit.

What a fun resource! Great activities for kids with bright colors!

Highly recommended for student of all ages. Great science and fun.

I used this as a journal activity while we reviewed the punctuation rules for dialogue. However, I modified the lesson so students had to write from the point of view of 2 objects that were next to each other on the Smithsonian's HistoryWired website: http://historywired.si.edu/index.html (However, I didn't allow them to write from the point of view of the Playboy bunny outfit!)

The students had fun choosing objects and getting into persona. It was a much more interesting way to reinforce punctuation rules than standard worksheets.

Extraordinary: image and sulpture

As a homeschool mom of 3 inquisitive boys I found this resource to be just what we need as we study the world, both ancient and modern. It has a plethora of information that is not too overwhelming but just enough to satisfy and teach. I would highly recommend this as a history and culture resource.

The Animal Encounter Lesson Plan in The Lewis and Clark Language of Discovery would be great for helping students understand how words allow us to visualize. It would also help students use more accurate words in their descriptions.

I home school my rising 9th grader who loves geography, and though there are a multitude of good world geography resources available, few of the ones I've seen have held my son's interest as "My Wonderful World" has. It's informative and can be used across disciplines like geography, history, art, and writing. Few resources have motivated my son to "look ahead" to other lessons in eager anticipation the way this one has.

While I was looking at the site, the kids came up and asked if I was playing a game. It had interesting facts about each topic. Topics seem limited, but, hopefully, they will expand.

A fun way to learn some basic history about things that you might see at the Smithsonian on a trip there. It definitely is more appealing to the younger child although it would have been great to have clicked on the flashing dots and seen or heard something interactive.

This includes a range of activities for all ages, which may be really good or really bad depending on what you're looking for. Some of the activities are really only appropriate for elementary school students, while others (especially the essay at the start) could be assigned to high school or even college students. The essay provides a compelling introduction to dinosaurs and to paleontology in general, but the activities lack oomph.

This issue printed in both English and Spanish is a resource for teachers working with younger students or for students with language art skills at the reading level.

The activity is one that any age could easily accomplish.

This is a clearly described, technically accurate description of the fossilization process. The images don't really add anything of value to the text, but in spite of that, this is a valuable resource for anyone who seeks to understand how fossils form. I plan to give this as a handout in my non-science majors' college Geology classes.

The breakdown of this resource was very helpful. We really enjoyed the experiments making fossils. I personally found it fascinating with the time lines. Also what to look for when exploring for fossils. A good point to remember its OK to look touch and explore but remember to put back so others can enjoy.

This resource gives excellent information for a teacher or any adult with limited knowledge of fossils. It helped me tremendously in explaining and clarifying some points about fossils with my 2nd graders. It also helped me feel more knowledgeable when answering some of their more challenging questions.

This year my home schooled son and I are learning about Native American History in Georgia and the southeastern US. We will be using "RELATIVE DATING IN ARCHEOLOGY" as one of our lessons. This plan will help us to understand how scientists date the artifacts they unearth and how that helps us understand the chronological history of the peoples and how their cultures evolved over time.

This is an older resource with several topics: aviation, books, endangered plants. The information on creating books offers a nice visual summary and the diagram for book-making is an excellent simple way to teach the parts of the book and its assembly. We look forward to trying making our own books. Thanks.

This resource has great ideas on how to re-create a city from 200 years ago for students. There are many interesting activities here for students, such as figuring out how long it would take them to walk the length of colonial Philadelphia. The PDF file is bulky though, so the easiest way to read the activity might be to print it first.

If you live in PA or not, this is a neat resource to show students how your city is like (and different) from the great Philadelphia. Use it with all ages, well worth it.

This lesson plan provides at least a week's worth of activities to do with students. It begins with a story about Philadelphia that will help even young children picture it in their minds. The activities listed, reading a map, writing about the town and comparing/contrasting it to a modern city will expand student's ideas about cities and how they have changed over time. The best part is the use of period pictures to help students "see" what life was like. The plan leads students through a virtual walk of Philadelphia during two different time periods.

I absolutely love this unit. My team's social studies teacher spends three to four months on Africa and introduces the students to its history and culture. Integrating the math then comes as a natural progression while tying in the state standards on measurement. As a culminating activity students create their own currency systems within their "tribes," create tribal names, invent a name for their currencies, assign values to their currencies and then trade with other tribes. We've used, among other items, beads, beans, poker chips, pencils, buttons, and sea shells. Some of the students' comments: "It felt like you were in a serious business," "I liked trying to figure out if we got the fair amount of our trade," and "I didn't like it because when we made good offers, the other tribe said no.”

This was an excellent hands on activities for the students to experience. My students were excited and eager to take part in this activity. They were able to learn a lot and then apply that knowledge to other civilizations. When assessed more then 85% of my students (in an extreme mixed ability group) mastered the content in this unit.

It would be an interesting way to expand a lesson on economics using some critical thinking skills.

This is a great source of information on Rainforests. It showed how all the elements are connected and dependent on each other for survival. The in dept discussion of the adaptations of different species is very interesting. There is a nice background of the different layers and their purpose. Despite the age of the material, it was very informative. I would recommend it.

This is a great resource to help with a study of the tropical rainforest. I do wish that the pictures could be clearer so that my children could see them better.

This learning activity fosters community connectivity and social collaboration. Though the phone book has now turned mostly online for retrieval of information, this lesson still offers fun learning. The scavenger hunt can either be done with the Yellow Pages or converted into an Internet hunt, by simply keyword searching the requested item PLUS the community in which the person lives. Students will learn a lot about their community, about advertising, mapping location skills, as well as practice retrieving validated information from websites, such as the URL, source and currency of information and of course, the phone number!

Why are the Yellow Pages yellow? When did the pages begin to be yellow? Browse this website for the answers!

While this activity provides students with real world experience, in this day and age of the internet, it is outdated. Modifying this lesson to include online search engines would make it so much stronger!

This is a great worksheet to help kids make the connections between plants and the foods we eat. This would be useful as an addition to a lesson plans on agriculture and how different areas of the world grow different things. I like that it included chocolate, something that most children enjoy.
One thing I did notice with my students was that they had trouble writing their answers on the small lines provided. Loved the great pictures of the plants....nice touch.

I loved this resource. It is very extensive and understandable and it is written in a way that makes you want to teach from it.

It is highly suitable for individual and small group teaching, which, as a home schooler, appeals to me.

This resource has lots of information that is a great follow-up to the new "Night at the Museum: Battle at the Smithsonian" movie. Students could be read the information about each person to see if they remember the person from the movie. The snake information is also great. The quality of the scan is not so good, especially the pictures. It would be wonderful if this information was made current for a better resource but still contains a wealth of valuable information.

Overall, it appears to be a good lesson plan for kids. However, because the project is based on an exhibit which ended several years ago, two of the three links included on the site are no longer active. Updating is a constant and labor-intensive process; I don’t know what kind of work-around you can do, but without current links, the lesson plan loses much of its value.

I am a Language Arts teacher and I have found many uses for this activity. It sparks a lot of conversation and can be used for creative thinking activities. I think you can add some writing/creative thinking questions about clothes of the future or have different groups design some clothes for the future. The final questions ask students about their own clothing choices and this could be a great writing assignment, "what my clothes say about me" If I were going to drag out this lesson you could have discussions about gender roles throughout the years, read stories from these time periods and base an entire unit on this idea of clothing, social changes, gender roles, and the changes that have made significant impacts to not only clothes, but every aspect of life. The possibilities are endless with these ideas and this lesson can be a great starting point to some great lessons!

This is a great resource I used it to help my daughter understand the difference and similarities in different ocean environments. She loved learning more about our own coast of Maine and the Caribbean where her aunt and uncle live. She learned a lot and had fun doing it.

This lesson gave good suggestions for learning about our past from photos. The historical information was interesting, but used some broad generalizations. Useful resource.

This site is wonderful. I would be able to use this site daily in my classroom. I can link ideas with what I am teaching the children. They need to see a visual picture of what they are learning. By using your site, I can give them information and pictures related to what we are studying.

This lesson is a great introduction for your students when learning about Japan. Because it utilizes more than just art comparison, including cultural and physical geography, it is appropriate to use to start your unit. Students will gain an understanding of Japan's current and past culture, as well as the geographical features. Finally, they put it all together using higher-order thinking skills to figure out ("being detectives") why Japanese art looks the way it does. Fun and informative lesson!

I found this to be fairly accurate, yet quite outdated. While many of the facts were true, much was not even mentioned, such as all of General Aviation and the role it plays in society. Visits to airports did not include many of the opportunities found at smaller, non-commercial airports. I probably would not use this particular resource, although I will definitely continue searching and find the website quite beneficial.

The article discusses the use of an insect zoo in a classroom. While it provides a plethora of information on the characteristics of insects and how those characteristics can be studied using an insect zoo, the article does not provide the basic information regarding how to initially create your classroom zoo. Where would the insects come from? What types of food would they need? Where would you get the containers to keep the insects in? It would be helpful to provide some type of resource on where to purchase cheap containers for your zoo, or a grant that provides such material. The idea behind the article is wonderful... having insects in the classroom is always beneficial for learning. If the authors took it a step further and discussed what insects make better pets, and where to find them it would have been a better read.

This lesson plan is a creative way to explore past, present, and future parallels and allows students to delve back in history to see how we got where we are in our world today. Some of the resources provided (websites) were not accessible anymore which was disappointing. Also, there is no rubric or grading scale of any kind provided with the lesson plan. I wish there was a worksheet attached to supplement the lesson plan. I like the general idea of the lesson, though; targeted at the earlier grades in high school.

I learned a lot about the different cultures that have contributed to the bible, but the video was kind of boring.

While this is all interesting information, it is very small print and hard to read.

I felt the substance of this particular lesson plan was quite thin. Vocabulary at this level should have included valve names, septum, etc. I would have liked to seen more detailed instructions on construction/expectations on the actual heart mobile--didn't expect it was a "free for all" lesson plan loosely tied to a very basic rubric.

As a quilter, I like to see anything that promotes the art of quilt making. I do question though if this lesson may be trying to pull too much together - quilting, math, and history – at the elementary school level. In addition, although geometry is part of the beauty of many quilts, I’ve never run across any quilt maker who thinks in mathematical terms. All this is not to say that the lesson couldn’t work; it just seems that it would be extremely challenging for very young children.

One other note: the link to the National Security site does not connect to the intended page.

The activity is great for gifted K students studying shadows by introducing the math behind shadows. Only the last link is available, and its reading level and content are too high for K, but could be introduced in math classes when they discuss angles (grade 4 gifted).

Certainly a zippy site, but once I got past the fun colors and sounds, I wasn't really sure what to do. I was able to get a little information about the topics (minerals, coins, and stamps), but not much. I'm not really sure what I would use this for.