Educator Resources The KU Natural History Museum has a variety of resources available for you to explore science topics with your classes onsite in the museum and in the classroom. Many items were created by museum educators and KU scientists as part of grant-funded projects, which reach more than 250,000 online users including K-12 students and teachers each year.
At the Museum
Discovery Guides
Museum discovery guides provide ways for groups to explore together.
Exhibit Activities
For a more in-depth independent exploration with your students, use these differentiated or NGSS connected exhibit activities; suitable for upper elementary/middle school and up. Please note: our 5th floor exhibit gallery is closed this fall for repairs, so Exhibit Activities that use items in this space (Investigating VIST, Selection in Finches and Flies) cannot be accessed.
- Convergent Evolution
- Evolutionary Relationships in the Museum & Beyond
- Interpreting Evolutionary Trees
- Investigating VIST (variation, inheritance, selection, time) Principles
- Shared Characters and Evolutionary Trees
- Selection in Finches and Flies
- Weather across Space & Time
- Costa Rica Archaeology
- Patterns, Scale & Structure
For the Classroom & Online: Evolution
Visit the For Teachers section for quick activities and lessons to teach with and about evolutionary tree diagrams.
Use the Fisheye view of the tree of life online module to explore fish characters, relationships and evolutionary innovations.
In the Investigating A Deep Sea Mystery lab activity students unravel the mystery of deep sea fishes' classification by analyzing morphological and phylogenetic data to test alternative hypotheses.
Explore Evolution
Use these student activities from Virus and the Whale to follow seven scientists to their labs and into the field.
For the Classroom & Online: Physics
Explore matter, forces, energy and more at Quarked! Adventures in the Subatomic Universe.
