useums Take Their Lessons to the Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: April 21, 2010
SUTTON, Mass. — Sitting in the dark, knees crossed, looking up at the stars projected on the planetarium dome, the fourth-grade class might have been on a field trip to the Museum of Science in Boston.
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
Brooke Annis, center, a fourth grader in Sutton, Mass., inside a traveling planetarium.
Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times
Nicholas Culross, a kindergartner at the Simonian Center for Early Learning, walked in a dinosaur’s footprints during a traveling lesson from Christina Moscat.
But instead, they were having what Katie Slivensky, an educator from the museum, calls a “backwards field trip” in a portable, inflatable planetarium set up for the morning in the old gym at Sutton High School — a 50-minute lesson on the stars, moon and planets, tied to state learning standards for physical science, earth and space.
Over the last few years, many schools have eliminated or cut back on museum trips, partly because of tight budgets that make it hard to pay for a bus and museum admission, and partly because of the growing emphasis on “seat time” to cover all the material on state tests.
To make up for the decline in visits, many museums are taking their lessons to the classroom, through traveling programs, videoconferencing or computer-based lessons that use their collections as a teaching tool.
“Even if they can’t come to the museum, we can bring the excitement of science to the school,” said Ms. Slivensky, one of seven traveling educators at the Boston museum.
At the Museum of Science, where school visits have dropped about 30 percent since 2007, demand for the 14 school travel programs — from the $280 “Animal Adaptations” to the $445 “Cryogenics’ — is booming.
Annette Sawyer, director of education and enrichment programs, said the museum would do almost 1,000 travel programs next year, 400 more than four years ago.
On a sunny spring morning, the Sutton schools, about an hour from Boston, have brought in both the planetarium program and, for the kindergarten, “Dig Into Dinosaurs.”
“It’s $275 a bus, and we’d need three buses for a grade level,” said Michael Breault, the principal. “We pay for field trips and special assemblies from a magazine fund-raiser at the beginning of the year, and this year, we didn’t sell as many magazines.”
And museum admission costs $7.50 a head.
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