Create
Creating your own collections and customizing resources to fit your needs makes the Learning Lab a one-of-a-kind resource for efficiency and creativity. Free your imagination – you can create collections using the Smithsonian's vast resources, add your own resources or those from other sources, annotate the objects you collect, develop your own quizzes and more. Create complete lessons or artistic collections, and build upon each for more personal and memorable learning.
Suggested Resources
Unpacking Sol LeWitt’s Open Cubes
Students will analyze Sol LeWitt's variations of the open cube to apply their knowledge of drawing cubes using isometric paper and nets of cubes. Students will extend their knowledge of surface area while observing LeWitt's Cube without a cube and make a generalization for two formulas.
This is an activity for a grade 6 or 7 geometry class. Prerequisite knowledge: volume, surface area and nets of cubes.
Students can do the work in groups of 2-3 there are sections for thinking routines and prompts for students to upload photos of their work.
Amanda Riske 
Visions of the Future
Students will watch a video where students complete a similar project, and then view a variety of artifacts presenting different views of the future, with questions for analysis. Finally, students will be tasked with developing their own vision for their city or town in the future.
Kate Harris Contemporary & Historic Architecture
How does the past influence the present and future? Compare forms in contemporary architecture with those of buildings from ancient and Renaissance times. What similarities can you find?
Jean-Marie Galing 
Compare and Contrast Looking Strategy: Learning to Look with the National Portrait Gallery
Included in this collection are examples of portraits National Portrait Gallery educators have had success with when facilitating the compare and contrast looking strategy while teaching in the galleries: Pocahontas, Shimomura Crossing the Delaware and Washington Crossing the Delaware, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, LL Cool J and John D. Rockefeller
Gender Inequality and Identity: Childe Hassam's Tanagra (The Builders, New York) 1918
This collection includes a multi-day lesson plan built around Childe Hassam's Tanagra (The Builders, New York), 1918, and is designed to explore the effect that gender inequality can have on identity. Lessons are designed for an eleventh-grade, American Studies, Humanities-style course, and the historical context is the Gilded Age and the Women's Suffrage Movement. The plan for this mini-unit includes the analysis of visual, literary, and historical texts, and while it has a historical context, the goal is also to make connections to American life today. The essential question for this mini-unit is this: How can unfair gender norms affect what it feels like to be a human being? Included, you will find a lesson plan as well as digital versions of the artistic, literary, and historical texts needed to execute that plan. #SAAMteach
William Connell Emergence of Civilization in China: Oracle Bones
In this student activity, students learn about life in early Chinese urban society by analyzing oracle bone divinations. These divinations, consisting of characters inscribed on turtle shells and animal bones over 3,000 years ago, are among the earliest systematic Chinese written language extant today. Students will answer object analysis questions, complete an activity using translations of divinations, and compare early Chinese urban society to Bronze Age societies in other parts of the world. This set includes multiple objects from the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Created by Elizabeth Eder and Keith Wilson at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in collaboration with Tess Porter, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access.
Tags: archaeology; ancestor worship; shang dynasty; diviner; early writing; early civilization; ritual; artifact; archaeological remains; artifact analysis
#historicalthinking
Cultural Imagery and Stereotypes: The American Experience in the Classroom
This collection focuses on two works that deal with the issues of nationality, identity and the assimilation of cultures. Mel Casas's pun-laced Humanscape 62 combines elements familiar to many Americans: brownie desserts and a young Girl Scout (a Brownie), with traditional Mexican imagery. This pop art style-blend illustrates the Chicano experience to American culture and creates a push and pull narrative about Latino identity. Similarly, Roger Shimomura, an American-born artist of Japanese descent, contemplates repressed emotions from the time he and his family spent in World War II-era Japanese internment camps, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.
#APA2018
