Teacher resources
Lesson plans, downloadable activities and local history references
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Artifacts Alive! Printable Boulder history program materials
Looking for a way to incorporate primary sources in an engaging way for your elementary school class? This program is made up of skits for students to perform that will bring artifacts from Boulder’s history to life! It’s also great for creative families looking for some group activities they can do indoors together.
Want to explore our artifacts in a fun and creative way? We’ve gathered some highlights from our collection and transformed them into coloring pages! As you bring history to life in your own colorful way, you can also read about the stories behind each artifact. All the objects are on display at the Museum, so when we open, be sure to come see what they look like in real life!
Online exhibits make Colorado history come alive through creative presentation of authentic artifacts, historical images and audio-visual materials. Interactive and social media components provide forums for conversation relating past themes and issues to contemporary life.
History Colorado’s online exhibits include:
- Amache: Japanese Internment in Colorado
- Colorado and the Fur Trade: Bent’s Fort
- La Gente: Colorado’s Hispano History
- African American History in Colorado
- Ute Tribal Paths
Teacher resources from the National Museum of the American Indian
From digital lessons to teaching guides and videos, these lessons from the Smithsonian are a great resource for supporting your curriculum about Native American history and cultures with multi-dimensional perspectives.
These 16 lesson plans cover a variety of topics introducing high school students to multiple aspects of the Colorado judicial system. Each is complete with a personalized introduction on the topic by a current or former Supreme Court justice or Court of Appeals judge. They were developed in conjunction with the Colorado Supreme Court and Colorado Court of Appeals “Courts in the Community” program.
Students will have the opportunity to zoom through the cosmos with Scott Carpenter, relive the Titanic tragedy through the eyes of Molly Brown, ride to Washington D.C. with Madeleine Albright, celebrate victory with John Elway, and learn so much more about the “colorful” state of Colorado and beyond through these comic book pages. Each comic is accompanied by a teacher’s guide from Pop Culture Classroom.
This evolving digital exhibit crowd-sources primary sources of the COVID-19 pandemic and Arizona State University masters students curate them into a multi-media documentation of people’s experiences of this unprecedented moment. It provides an opportunity for teachers to work with students to think through primary sources and how the act of preserving primary source material shapes what stories will be told in the future. Invite them to curate exhibits of their own images and artifacts, illustrating different ways the story could be shaped based on different material they select for their exhibits.
Click here for a timeline of some of the notable things that have happened in Boulder through the years.
Looking for inspiration for stories to include in your Boulder history units? Check out our blog for a variety of lesser-known vignettes of Boulder history.
