Our Democracy: A National Youth Summit civic education series Over the course of the 2022–2023 school year, we'll release classroom resources that address the driving question, "How do the stories we tell about our past shape our democracy?" Each case study uses museum objects and artifacts,

How can educators of all disciplines prepare students to be active and informed participants in a democracy? Join us to explore this question through the lens of six Smithsonian collections! Discover how museum objects can help learners explore the challenges and opportunities of living in a democra

The Smithsonian Transcription Center, the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access, and Smithsonian Enterprises collaborated with five secondary teachers from the greater Washington, D.C., metro area to create

In support of the traveling exhibition of Girlhood (It's complicated), the Smithsonian has developed a set of curricular materials and platforms to create meaningful learning opportunities for girls (and all students) in your learning network connected to this content.

Monetary objects are powerful sources for exploring the past. The Value of Money connects American history to global histories of exchange, cultural interaction and expression, political change, and innovation through objects from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Numismatic Collection. T

As COVID-19 deaths spiked in 2020, Suzanne Firstenberg’s public art installation "In America: How could this happen…" memorialized the number of people in the United States who lost their lives to the Corona virus pandemic as of November of 2020. The work (taking up 4 acres of the Washington, DC

2001 edition sushi kit produced by the Advanced Fresh Concepts Corporation in California. The lid advertises the kit as the "ultimate sushi kit," complete with "everything you need to start making sushi" displaying photographs of sushi, a How to Sushi Booklet, and lists the ingredients and material

The blue dress worn by Constance Wu in the film "Crazy Rich Asians." The film was the first Hollywood film to star a mostly East Asian cast since 1993's "The Joy Luck Club." The Marchesa dress is a Grecian-style dress with light blue tulle. Learn more about the artifact!

For decades, teachers drilled American school children using flash cards that gave simple arithmetic problems. The advent of inexpensive electronic calculators in the 1970s made it possible to do much routine arithmetic automatically. To teach school children the meaning of basic operations, new dev

In the early 1960s, the Chicago firm of Playskool introduced this educational toy for children three to six years old, seeking to give them an early familiarity with numbers. It has two rows of relatively large rotating wooden rectangular blocks, each with a row of square rotating wooden blocks belo