Museum Project
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
No two Big History lessons are the same. Find lesson objectives, pacing, vocabulary, and teaching tips in this guide.
Blog: You Can Thank the Ancients
Students may ask, Why should we care about ancient societies? Check out this blog post to read about some legacies of the ancient world that are still relevant today.
Driving Question: How did ancient societies contribute to our world today?
Time to create the best museum in history, right in your own classroom. Develop an exhibit that illustrates one of the societies you learned about in this unit.
Learning Objectives:
- Compare early societies.
- Conduct research using multiple sources to formulate and answer questions about early societies.
- Create arguments using historical evidence to support claims and communicate conclusions through individual or shared writing, speaking, and other formats.
Vocab Terms:
- artifact
- civilization
- culture
- empire
- society
- trade
Don’t skip the Museum Project! As one OER Project teacher observed, “Students get to choose their role, and each path asks students to research an ancient society and present their findings in a different format. The result is that the whole class ends up teaching each other! The opener and closer activities are worth doing as written—they help students make comparisons across societies, which is the content goal of the unit.”
Museums contain tons of ancient objects, descriptions from scholars, re-creations of monuments, and more. Now it’s your turn to create your own museum exhibit based on everything you’ve learned.
If you’d like to expand the museum project to include different ancient societies than those covered in this unit, provide students with a list of approved societies to choose from.
While it’s not nice to play favorites, you’ll have to decide on the society you like the most. Let’s find out who you’ll be focusing on for this project.
The Museum Project is a classroom favorite! Just be sure to have supplies—such as posters, markers, and scissors—on hand to help students create their maps, craft their artifacts, or write their stories.
As a museum curator, you have a lot of power. You’ll use these hands-on activities to help you decide what it is about your society that you want to focus on, and how you want to show it off!
Well, you’re finished being a curator for now, but you did a lot of thinking and exploring in the process. Let’s bring it all together.
