American Museum of Natural History:9^th grade

Discovering Our Planet

Grade Levels: 9th

Learning Standard: Standard 4, Standard 6, and Standard 7

Time Requirements: 2 –3 classes + ½ day field trip

Topic Covered by This Lesson: Planet Earth

PreVisit:

1) Open discussion to find out what student’s knowledge base is.

2) Discussion to find out what students hope to learn or what questions they want to answer at the museum.

3) Separate class into groups of three students and assign two team projects to each group and allow each group to collectively decide on one extra project. A team project is a list of questions that can be answered by extracting information from a specific section in the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth.

Visit: Bring students to museum and allow them to finish their projects. Encourage students to ask employee “Explainers” at the museum.

Post Visit: If possible allow each team to spend 5 minutes “teaching” an informal lesson to the class about what they learned in completing the project that that team chose. If there is not a wide distribution of the chosen projects, then have the students to do one of their assigned projects.

Possible questions that may be brought up: Any questions that may come up could lead to later papers and projects. Each team could come up with a question (with the teachers approval) that they couldn’t answer at the museum and have them research it and write a paper, give a presentation, make a poster board, or make a model.

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