Lesson Plans and Classroom Activities
Conduct an oral history project with your class or organization using historic images from IUMAA's collection or your own personal pictures.
Full Lesson Plan
Shortened Lesson Plan
Student Worksheets
Sample Projects
Clothing Project Childhood Project Historic Bloomington Project
The ability to critically examine and make sense of primary sources is an incredibly useful skill for students to possess. Photographs are a powerful primary source because they provide a direct visual connection to the past. However, that directness can potentially obscure the full story, and viewers need to consider how photographers can manipulate the story by what and how they photograph. The Power of the Photographer, and the photographs inside, provide students with an opportunity to learn and focus this skill.
Field Trips and Classroom Visits
This section lists topics that we routinely cover on fieldtrips and classroom visits. However, there are many other lessons we can cover using our collection. If you don't see the topic you are looking for, please contact museumed@iu.edu and we will try our best to meet your needs.
Take a behind the scenes tour with museum staff. Learn about the different jobs available at the museum while looking into our collection, research, and construction spaces.
Get up close and personal with a wide range of objects from our education collection. Students handle the objects and make observations before sharing what they found with the class. We discuss what we can and cannot learn by only studying objects and why some are easily recognizable to us and others are a mystery.
This can be done in the classroom or at the museum.
This can be done in the classroom or at the museum.