In my nearly decade-long teaching career, I’ve heard the phrase “think outside of the box” more times than I can count. As it turns out, an activity that challenged me to think inside of a box changed the way that I teach.

Last spring I had the privilege of working with colleagues from across my network in a professional learning community. It was a great opportunity to work with a group of talented teachers who all came together to share their best practices in teaching social studies. One meeting presented me with a practice I had never thought of before: using historical artifacts in the classroom.

Philip Panaritis, a Teaching American History project director in the Bronx and the co-facilitator of the professional learning community, brought two of the project’s artifact kits neatly organized in two large plastic boxes and distributed one artifact to each group member. We were instructed to examine the artifact closely and try to figure out what it was. I made some low-inference observations and shared my guess with the group.

Panaritis then explained to all of us that these were genuine artifacts from the late 19th century that were excavated from Maujer Street in Brooklyn. We were each given a research card that corresponded to our given artifact and revealed its true identity. The card also provided a plethora of information about what the item would have been used for, critical vocabulary associated with the artifact, vivid graphics related to it and much more.

The question was then posed to the group: “How can you use these with your students?” We all shared some quick ideas, and I decided I definitely wanted to use these kits after “testing season” was over.

Over the next few weeks, I developed a mini-unit for my 5th-grade class. Through teaching this unit, I discovered that even my most reluctant students became excited by holding history in their hands, not just reading about it in a book or seeing it behind glass enclosures in a museum. It was by far the most well-received unit I taught all year.

My unit focused on students first observing and exploring their artifacts and then making inferences utilizing their observations for support. Next, they examined and analyzed the research that was done about the artifact. The unit culminated in the students writing a narrative from the artifact’s perspective. Other teachers have used the kits to have students write immigrant diary entries, create time capsules, “publish” a 19th-century newspaper and more.

The beauty of using an artifact as a teaching tool is that your students can elicit their own ideas about the object first. You can facilitate their learning by providing them with guided lessons and factual information about their artifact and then allow them to have a choice or be creative in terms of an end product. Activities utilizing artifacts can easily be used in social studies classrooms, but they also lend themselves easily to English language arts, science, foreign language and math classes. I’ve even heard of a teacher who in September fills shoeboxes with “artifacts” from her summer vacation and then asks her students to examine them and see if they can figure out what she did over the break.

Using artifacts as teaching tools allows you to easily tailor activities to meet the needs of your students. I chose to develop my activities on three different levels so all of my students could access the information in different ways. You could also have struggling readers look at images of a similar artifact from the time period rather than reading large amounts of text in order to gather information.

Teaching American History has five artifact kits available for teachers to use in Department of Education schools. You can find out more about the kits and other wonderful free resources that the learning community has made available to teachers through its website, www.TAHgrant.net.

The New York Historical Society also has a social studies enrichment program for grades pre-K through 11 where a museum educator will bring artifacts into your classroom. Of course, you can always look for replica artifacts in many museum or historic site gift shops.