This site explores the diversity of Africa's cultures and their influence on work, family, and community. Sculptures, textiles, interviews, proverbs, prayers, folk tales, and songs are included.

This site examines the job of a president, the balance of power with the Supreme Court and Congress, and ways presidents have communicated with the public. Features include the battle sword of George Washington, the lap desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the top hat worn by Abraham Lincoln the night he was assassinated.

This activity guide accompanies the exhibition America on the Move. It delivers a variety of historical primary-source materials from the exhibition directly to your classroom. Through these documents and activities, students can build a deeper understanding of how transportation shaped American commerce, communities, landscapes, and population migrations.

The Western landscape which George Catlin encountered on his travels was dominated by the great expanse of the tall and short grass prairies. Home to countless species of plant and animal life, the great prairies once spanned millions of acres across North America. Today less than ten percent of the complex ecosystem remains, largely under the protection of parks and nature preserves. In this lesson students will gain an understanding of the interdependence of living organisms on the prairie and the fragility of their existence by investigating life on the prairie and relating their findings to their own experience.

Find the right vehicles for a new movie from the America on the Move collection, then watch the movie that you’ve created on the big screen. See how much you know about the history of transportation with the interactive games in this online collection. You can find information, artifacts and photographs in the collection as well.

Students are introduced to the work of botanists and botanical illustrators, and specifically to their race to make records of endangered plant species around the world. Students examine illustrations, photographs, and dried specimens of endangered plants and consider the conservation value of an illustration over a photographic image. In a second session, students try their own hands at botanical illustration and follow the methods of a Smithsonian staff illustrator. Pencils, markers, tracing paper, and access to a photocopier are required.

In this lesson students will learn about the varying attitudes and definitions of land ownership held by Native and European Americans by studying a variety of primary documents from the nineteenth century. They will learn about how various treaties—the Homestead Act and the Dawes Act—affected both Native and European Americans. Students will discuss these issues in the form of a debate, and will also write journal entries.

This site examines the Civil War through collections of artifacts. Topics include slavery and abolition, Abraham Lincoln, the first Union officer killed, soldiering, weapons, leaders, cavalries, navies, life and culture, Appomattox, Winslow Homer, and Mathematics and Statistics. A Civil War time-line is included.

In pretending, we learn to navigate with ease between real and imaginary worlds while learning the differences between them. Using our imaginations encourages original thinking, flexibility, adaptability, empathy, and the ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem. Pretend play helps us learn to think visually and spatially and to both capture and express ideas.

Artists across cultures and throughout time have sought to incorporate the multifaceted connections between past and present in their artworks. In many ways, Catlin's lifelong quest and the eventual creation of his "Indian Gallery" can be seen as an attempt to connect what he felt to be the "past" of American Indian society to the "present" of nineteenth-century westward expansion by European Americans. As is evident today, Native American culture is very much alive and present in the fabric of America. Catlin, however, made it clear that he viewed his subjects as a "vanishing race" and sought to preserve their images for future generations. In this activity, students will create their own memory box, linking the past and the present, and in so doing examine Catlin's ideas and motives.

This is a creative approach to teaching basic skills involved in the formal visual analysis of works of art. Students will learn how to interpret artworks in cultural and historical contexts by becoming "art detectives." Students will analyze Catlin's formal compositions to learn about the Native American leaders he painted. They will examine visual clues and write a final "case summary" in which they "crack Catlin's code."

After studying the historic events of Catlin's life, this project allows students to imagine the material culture of the time. They will become archaeologists and anthropologists, looking back on previous cultures for clues as to the motives and inspirations for the choices that shaped their lives. Each student will bring in a fabricated artifact from Catlin's life, resulting in a museum exhibit in the class.

This site introduces students to archeology -- the study of material remains to learn about past human experiences. This lesson (Grades 3-8) discusses various challenges of an archaeologist: locating a site that will yield clues about the people who once lived there, conducting excavations, and more. Students identify artifacts from a contemporary setting, describe the function of each artifact, identify methods for dating soil layers, and interpret soil profiles.

This site helps students answer questions about dinosaurs: What makes a dinosaur a dinosaur? Where did they live? What caused their mass extinction? Students can participate in a virtual dinosaur discovery, follow milestones in dinosaur evolution, and see behind-the-scenes slide-shows of the lab environment where vertebrate specimens are prepared for exhibits and research.

Travel through time and decide how to get from here to there, while assembling your own photo album. See how much you know about the history of transportation with the interactive games in this online collection. You can find information, artifacts and photographs in the collection as well.

This game examines several of Thomas Edison's inventions: the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and electric light bulb. Students learn about his life and how to create their own light bulb.

This site offers geography and history activities showing how two years in history had an indelible impact on American politics and culture. Students interpret historical maps, identify territories acquired by the U.S., identify states later formed from these territories, examine the territorial status of Texas, and identify political, social, and economic issues related to the expansion of the U.S. in the 1840s.

Finding common ground helps students make informed decisions to conserve temperate forests in the United States and central China, habitat of the endangered giant panda. Through classroom activities, on-line simulations, and field investigations students learn about the important role temperate forests play in local and global ecosystems. Action steps culminate in a Class Conservation Action Plan.
In the course of this curriculum students locate the biome in which they live, explore a local habitat, and conduct a biological inventory to assess habitat health and natural and human impacts to this habitat; explore the temperate forest biome through A Walk in the Forest, a virtual forest field study, and through hands-on field studies in a local forest or woodland; examine flora and fauna from the two most biodiverse temperate forest regions, central China and Appalachia, and monitor the impacts of habitat loss and degradation on forest organisms and biodiversity; design the optimal zoo habitat; put their knowledge into action by creating their own Class Conservation Action Plan, building on artifacts in their Habitat Journals and Action Plan Portfolios.

This site examines the history of Earth. Learn about the formation of Earth, dating the age of rocks, geologic time, plate tectonics, climate change, ocean circulation, evolution, extinction, ecology, and topics related to paleobiology.