Before Your Visit

Here's a simple exercise to get your students ready for their museum excursion. Museums tell the story of the past through objects or artifacts made by or used by people in those times. Learning to "read" an artifact is a skill to be acquired through practice just like reading a text.

Select an object that may be unfamiliar to students. It can be anything. The important thing is to teach students how to really look at an object and to use logic to reason out the following:

Five questions to ask about any object-

Ask students to describe the artifact's physical characteristics and to guess the use of the object both in the present and in the past. Discuss how students developed their ideas about the object. Did the student have to touch the object to determine if it was hard or soft? Did he or she have to lift it to know if it was heavy or light? If not by physically testing the object, then how did they make a judgment? (Prior knowledge of the characteristics of similar objects allows us to make predictions about new objects.)

At the Museum

In each gallery, select a student to choose an artifact and tell about it using the above five questions (repeat throughout your visit to give each student an opportunity). Or, to make a game of it, ask the students to describe the artifact (using the five questions) without naming it. Other class members should wait until the description is finished, then guess the object described. Before moving on to the next exhibit or gallery, discuss why the artifacts described are displayed in their setting: how do they relate to each other? (historical time period, similar art style, related use, etc.)

Contact the Michigan Historical Museum.

Updated 09/09/2010