The museum's Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life explores the diverse, complex web of life supported by the ocean and the vital inter-relationships between human and aquatic systems. This insert to the hall guide is designed to help you maximize your trip to the museum.

In this classroom activity, young students compare their feet to the foot of a large Apatosaur. The activity opens with background information for teachers about the enormous size range of dinosaurs. After using personal references to describe the size of dinosaurs, students examine the outline of an Apatosaur footprint. Students then estimate how many of their footprints would fit inside the Apatosaur footprint and conduct an experiment to test their estimate.

What happens when asteroids head for Earth? Most don't make it through the atmosphere. This comic strip, a supplement to the Hall of Meteorites Educator's Guide, uses detailed cross-section drawings to show what happens when one does.

This six-day unit provides an in-depth look at the dynamic forces at work on the sea floor. Throughout the unit, students collect their findings in a portfolio. The comprehensive curriculum materials include teacher tools such as individually downloadable readings and detailed daily breakdowns of tasks, a hands-on experiment, three activities about how scientists find deep sea vents and two activities about the thriving ecosystems found in deep sea vents.

In this interview, Mark Siddall talks about his work as an invertebrate systematist and how marine organisms eat. Using a question and answer format, information is presented on the feeding habits, behaviors and strategies of various types of marine animals.

Did you know that when you look at a star, your eyes are capturing light that traveled all the way from the star to your eye? Learn more about how light carries information from distant objects. This Moveable Museum article, available as a nine-page printable PDF file, offers a kid-friendly look at how information about distant objects comes to us in the form of light. It includes suggested resources for further research.

Produced by the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, these four guides form a four-part series, Living With Biodiversity: What You Can Really Do For the Environment. The four guides in pdf format are: Biodiversity and Your Food, Biodiversity and Your Energy Use, Biodiversity and What You Buy and Biodiversity and Your Water Supply.

Students learn about the subjective value of objects in this Moveable Museum lesson plan by "interpreting" each other's important cultural artifacts. The 11-page PDF guide has educator materials with background information, teacher strategies, assessment guidelines, and detailed notes about the curriculum standards addressed.

In this Digital Universe activity, students learn about observation, representation, perspective, and modeling by working up from two-dimensional perspective drawings to constructing and examining three-dimensional models. The printable PDF activity includes illustrated step-by-step instructions for the following hands-on and computer-assisted activities: Rendering Perspective in Two Dimensions and Creating a Three-Dimensional View. The American Museum of Natural History‰'s ‰"Digital Universe" program, including the Partiview software and Milky Way Atlas data set are needed for this activity and can be downloaded.

This Special Collection contains resources to inform your planetarium experience and help you explore the ideas introduced in the Space Show. Resources include articles, interactives, and activities that explain how collisions take place throughout the universe and why understanding them is important.

Students learn about parallax in this Moveable Museum unit, in which they use mathematical techniques related to parallax to calculate the height of an object. The eight-page PDF guide includes suggested general background readings for educators, activity notes, step-by-step directions, a Data Sheet and a Tangent Table, and an astrolabe template.

In this Digital Universe activity, students practice the scientific skills of observation, inference, and modeling and learn about scale, perspective, and distance by building a three-dimensional model of something they usually perceive as two-dimensional. The 11-page printable PDF activity includes illustrated step-by-step instructions for the following hands-on and computer-assisted activities:Introducing the Constellations, Making a Two-Dimensional Constellation Model, Introducing Parallax and Luminosity, Using Parallax and Luminosity, and Viewing Orion in Three Dimensions.

The Passport to the Universe space show reveals the universe's wonders in a way never before possible in a planetarium. This comprehensive guide to the space show is designed to help you maximize your viewing. It includes background information to help you prepare for your planetarium field trip, detailed information about what you'll see before and during the show and suggestions for several pre- and post-visit activities to do with your students. There are notes about how the show addresses performance standards and curriculum requirements.

Students learn about pixels in this Moveable Museum unit, in which they decode a simple digital image from a string of numbers. The eight-page PDF guide includes suggested general background readings for educators, activity notes, step-by-step directions, and activity handouts. There are two versions of the activity, one for Grades K-3 and one for Grades 4-8 Version.

The unit is designed to be completed in six or more sessions. The comprehensive curriculum materials contain information for teachers, including activity tips and an overview of the many varied reasons that plant life flourishes in one plot but not another. Students speculate on why plants are more abundant in some areas of the site than others. They list factors that might account for the differences, such as temperature, humidity, light, soil, rainfall, wind, and human or animal activity, and figure out how they can collect more data on these factors. They discuss why it might be important to take a count of all the individual plants in each plot and develop a plan for conducting the field study. A reading selection describes how scientists count plants and gives students tips for conducting their own survey. Students then count plants and record their data. Several optional activities are provided.

This unit on plant identification helps students prepare for their fieldwork by developing their observational skills and introducing them to resources that will help them with plant identification. It's designed to be completed in five or more sessions and has comprehensive curriculum materials information for teachers, including overviews of binomial nomenclature and dichotomous keys. Additionally, a guide to finding local specialists is available online. There are optional activites and information on supplemental resources available on line.

This list of 12 investigative questions is designed to help students observe how insects interact with plants in their habitat. The one-page printable PDF list includes questions about the insect behavior and the plant characteristics.

This handout is designed to enhance a visit to the museum's Hall of the Universe and Space Show. The printable two-page handout includes information about water, energy, elements, and the other factors whose favorable balance allows life to exist on Earth, an overview, with illustrations, of how our solar system was formed and questions for students to answer based on the information in this handout and the exhibits at the museum.

In this classroom activity, students create models of the spinning Earth and see how the planet's revolution around the Sun creates differing daily and seasonal patterns of dark and light. The printable five-page handout includes a series of inquiry-based questions to get students thinking about daily and seasonal light cycles, detailed experiment directions and a worksheet that helps students use the experiment results to gain a deeper understanding of why Antarctica doesn't have daily nights and days.

Using simple, inexpensive items, students build and test submarine models in a single class period. They gain insight into the engineering that's required to make these machines ascend, descend, and hover safely in extreme environments. The printable eight-page handout includes a series of inquiry-based questions that get students thinking about the complex engineering required for submersibles, illustrated experiment directions, and a worksheet that includes thought-provoking questions along with areas for recording experiment data.