Oct 6, 2005 2:51 PM
If you’re a kid growing up in New York City or a teacher in the city’s public schools, riches of every sort are at your fingertips.
Great art and music of every kind and age, wild technology, exotic plants and animals, galaxies and planets, dinosaurs, medieval tapestries and mummies, rain forests and ancient temples, all can be found in the five boroughs.
Millions of tourists from around the world flock to enjoy this bounty each year.
But too many of our children miss it all, locked into the mini world of neighborhood, with no idea of this greater world and no one to show them the way. For the luckiest children there’s been a teacher who unlocked the treasures and introduced them to that wider world through class trips to museums, concert halls, zoos, planetariums, aquariums and journeys through history.
Here in New York City there’s a resource to enrich every curriculum at every grade level. Most provide creative lessons, ideas and materials that conform to state learning standards for art, English language arts and social studies, and tailor them to student age and ability. Many provide in-depth professional development for teachers to prepare their classes for a visit.
In the Big Apple, the most powerful virtual reality simulator in the world is at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, ready to transport students to the beginning of time where they journey through 13 billion years of cosmic evolution. The 400,000 students who visit the museum annually enjoy hands-on activities on topics ranging from the age of dinosaurs to the very latest in space travel.
Among the city’s top attractions is certainly the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mecca for four million visitors a year. Beyond the world’s greatest paintings, the Met has collections representing world culture from prehistory to the present. Students can cap a visit to one of the world’s finest collections of Egyptian artifacts with a walk through the original Temple of Dendur.
Maggie Reilly, an art teacher at the Computer School, explained, “It’s one thing to talk about artifacts and another for the kids to actually see thousand-year-old artifacts. That makes it real, creates a story for them and puts them there. The connection is invaluable and goes way beyond the textbook.”
If you’re a kid growing up in New York City or a teacher in the city’s public schools, riches of every sort are at your fingertips.
Great art and music of every kind and age, wild technology, exotic plants and animals, galaxies and planets, dinosaurs, medieval tapestries and mummies, rain forests and ancient temples, all can be found in the five boroughs.
Millions of tourists from around the world flock to enjoy this bounty each year.
But too many of our children miss it all, locked into the mini world of neighborhood, with no idea of this greater world and no one to show them the way. For the luckiest children there’s been a teacher who unlocked the treasures and introduced them to that wider world through class trips to museums, concert halls, zoos, planetariums, aquariums and journeys through history.
Here in New York City there’s a resource to enrich every curriculum at every grade level. Most provide creative lessons, ideas and materials that conform to state learning standards for art, English language arts and social studies, and tailor them to student age and ability. Many provide in-depth professional development for teachers to prepare their classes for a visit.
In the Big Apple, the most powerful virtual reality simulator in the world is at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, ready to transport students to the beginning of time where they journey through 13 billion years of cosmic evolution. The 400,000 students who visit the museum annually enjoy hands-on activities on topics ranging from the age of dinosaurs to the very latest in space travel.
Among the city’s top attractions is certainly the Metropolitan Museum of Art, mecca for four million visitors a year. Beyond the world’s greatest paintings, the Met has collections representing world culture from prehistory to the present. Students can cap a visit to one of the world’s finest collections of Egyptian artifacts with a walk through the original Temple of Dendur.
Maggie Reilly, an art teacher at the Computer School, explained, “It’s one thing to talk about artifacts and another for the kids to actually see thousand-year-old artifacts. That makes it real, creates a story for them and puts them there. The connection is invaluable and goes way beyond the textbook.”
A funded program at CS 211 in Brooklyn brings the Met to the school and the children to the Met. Four 4th-grade classes and their teachers — two general education, one bilingual and one special education — are participating in a yearlong art history program that “supports the curriculum in every way, is culturally fantastic and touches us in every way,” according to teacher Ida Kivelevich.
Adele Unterberger, who has been teaching for 37 years and organizing class trips almost that long, couldn’t say enough about how supportive of teachers and public schools the Met is. She described slide presentations to meet specific teacher requests, professional development programs and “lunch-and-learn programs” held at schools in all the boroughs. And she also spoke of how the toughest kids from her lower East Side school, PS 134, “cannot believe the beauty of the museums’ main lobby or the vast extent of the collections.”
Students visiting the newly renovated Ellis Island Museum can trace the arrival in America of their relatives from among the 22 million immigrants processed through the Island between 1892 and 1954. They can see examples of the bigotry each ethnic group faced and activate giant displays showing facts and figures about each wave of immigrants.
At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, students actually see how their immigrant ancestors lived and talk to staff members in period dress who portray family members and answer questions about life at that time.
Teacher Debbie Ganeles of PS 178 called her tenement trips from Queens with 4th-graders “wonderfully visual and experiential. The children are so hungry to go places, and here they were able to see and understand about sweat shops and whole families doing piece work at home after work.”
Last year, 26,415 school children dropped in on the 1916 apartment of the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family, the 1870 German-Jewish Gumpertz family and the 1930 apartment of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family. Visitors even celebrated an 1897 home birth and paid a shiva call to a family mourning the loss of Abraham, who worked as a garment factory presser and died of tuberculosis in 1918.
In historic Richmond Town on Staten Island, classes can get a real taste of life in old New York from colonial 1690s to the industrial 1890s.
To see how immigrants got here, book a ride on a masted schooner from the South Street Seaport Museum.
At a recent open house for teachers at the American Folk Museum, teachers toured the exhibits in the architecturally fascinating building and learned they can request specific kinds of classroom materials and tours for their classes.
A funded program at CS 211 in Brooklyn brings the Met to the school and the children to the Met. Four 4th-grade classes and their teachers — two general education, one bilingual and one special education — are participating in a yearlong art history program that “supports the curriculum in every way, is culturally fantastic and touches us in every way,” according to teacher Ida Kivelevich.
Adele Unterberger, who has been teaching for 37 years and organizing class trips almost that long, couldn’t say enough about how supportive of teachers and public schools the Met is. She described slide presentations to meet specific teacher requests, professional development programs and “lunch-and-learn programs” held at schools in all the boroughs. And she also spoke of how the toughest kids from her lower East Side school, PS 134, “cannot believe the beauty of the museums’ main lobby or the vast extent of the collections.”
Students visiting the newly renovated Ellis Island Museum can trace the arrival in America of their relatives from among the 22 million immigrants processed through the Island between 1892 and 1954. They can see examples of the bigotry each ethnic group faced and activate giant displays showing facts and figures about each wave of immigrants.
At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, students actually see how their immigrant ancestors lived and talk to staff members in period dress who portray family members and answer questions about life at that time.
Teacher Debbie Ganeles of PS 178 called her tenement trips from Queens with 4th-graders “wonderfully visual and experiential. The children are so hungry to go places, and here they were able to see and understand about sweat shops and whole families doing piece work at home after work.”
Last year, 26,415 school children dropped in on the 1916 apartment of the Sephardic-Jewish Confino family, the 1870 German-Jewish Gumpertz family and the 1930 apartment of the Sicilian-Catholic Baldizzi family. Visitors even celebrated an 1897 home birth and paid a shiva call to a family mourning the loss of Abraham, who worked as a garment factory presser and died of tuberculosis in 1918.
In historic Richmond Town on Staten Island, classes can get a real taste of life in old New York from colonial 1690s to the industrial 1890s.
To see how immigrants got here, book a ride on a masted schooner from the South Street Seaport Museum.
At a recent open house for teachers at the American Folk Museum, teachers toured the exhibits in the architecturally fascinating building and learned they can request specific kinds of classroom materials and tours for their classes.
Michele Talarico-Vizthum said it was “enriching” for her PS 171, Queens, students to come into the city to experience the “energy and scope that is so much bigger than anything they live with in their neighborhoods.” On the other hand, she said, “This museum is not intimidating and the children see work they can imagine themselves doing.”
Carol Saft of Vanguard HS in the Julia Richmond Education Complex agreed the “scale of the museum is inviting so kids feel really comfortable and come back on their own. They also respond to the grassroots elements in this art.” Some of her students participate in the museum’s yearlong training program to learn about the operation of a museum and study the museum collection in depth. In the summer they are hired as docents to lead tours.
The New York Historical Society has just opened an exhibition it describes as one of the most significant exhibitions in its 200-year history — Slavery in New York — a topic “barely mentioned in school textbooks.” The exhibit notes that “at the time of the Revolution, there were more slaves in New York than in any city except Charleston, SC.” What an opportunity for social studies teachers.
At the New York City Fire Museum, 10,000 children last year learned how to get out of a burning apartment — all part of the safety and historical tour.
K-2 children can meet Officer Mike and older students can work on detective assignments at the New York City Police Museum, where they also see the evolution of the department from the early days of New Amsterdam’s eight-man policing team to today’s largest force in the country.
And there’s so much more. While there are zoos in all the boroughs, the 265-acre Bronx Zoo has the largest African rain forest ever built and is home to more than 4,000 animals, many of them endangered species.
You can even do a Friday overnight with students from grades 7-12 at the 14-acre New York Aquarium in Brooklyn .
While the 83-acre Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island is still expanding, the Children’s Museum, Sculpture Garden, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art and the Botanical Garden provide educational opportunities at all levels.
At the expanding Queens Botanical Gardens environmental workshops and tours are a valuable learning resource.
Then there are the scores of museums representing the ethnic diversity of the city and museums featuring everything from photography to the moving image, television and radio.
To tap into all these riches, go to http://www.ny.com/museums/all.museums.html for a listing of almost 100 city museums.
The State Edition of New York Teacher will feature museums around the state in the Oct. 20 issue.