Traveling Suitcase Exhibits
A-State Museum offers suitcase exhibits designed to enhance classroom and other group learning experiences. Kits include hands-on materials, visual aids, and lesson plans designed to help facilitators.
TSEs are available at no charge for a 2-week period. For more information email us at museum@astate.edu or call 870-972-2074 to speak with our educator.
- Pioneer Living Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
- Arkansas Frontier Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
- Portals of the Soul: Native American Culture Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
- For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights
- WWII on the Arkansas Homefront
Pioneer Living Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
This highly informative kit contains household items and other objects that were part of pioneer life.
When families set out on the pioneer trail, they took only the things they would need to survive. Students can pretend that they are beginning a long treacherous journey on the trail. They will need to wisely choose what they pack in their wagons, how to do the math of travel planning, how to do laundry on a washboard, and more.
Each kit comes with lesson plans and a full list of the Arkansas Standards that guide teachers and meet state requirements.
Arkansas Standards for Pioneer Living TSE.pdf
Arkansas Frontier Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
This Traveling Suitcase Exhibit provides math, social studies, and creative writing programming that will mentally transport your students to the Arkansas Frontier.
As students make their way through the imaginary wilds of early 19th century Arkansas, they will hunt, trade, do the math to decide which candle gives the best trading post bargain, and much more.
Each kit comes with lesson plans and a full list of the Arkansas Standards that guide teachers and meet state requirements.
Arkansas Standards for Frontier TSE.pdf
Portals of the Soul: Native American Culture Traveling Suitcase Exhibit
While this Traveling Suitcase Exhibit mirrors the teachings of our museum exhibit of the same name, it goes further by offering prehistoric-themed science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) and writing activities as well as touchable artifacts.
Students may play games having to do with portals symbols, the Native American chunky stone, and atlatl math. Students may also participate in a tools-of-the-trade activity by creating their own tools using recyclable materials. They can also create pottery designs, learn about animals and mythical creatures who live in each of the "three worlds," and much more.
Each kit comes with lesson plans and a full list of the Arkansas Standards that guide teachers and meet state requirements.
For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights
This education kit is an outreach toolbox for exploring themes and select images that represent the crossroads of visual culture and the history of the Civil Rights movement from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.
Through image discussions, hands-on activities and touchable objects, students can make connections to depictions of race and the struggle for equality that are ongoing today.
Each kit comes with lesson plans and a full list of the Arkansas Standards that guide teachers and meet state requirements.
Arkansas Curriculum Standards TSE for For All The World To See TSE.pdf
WWII on the Arkansas Homefront
This traveling suitcase exhibit (TSE) teaches WWII era history through the lens of local community members who kept the home fires burning on the Arkansas homefront. WWII artifacts, posters, music, and etcetera allow teachers to share a variety of ways in which local homefront heroes and heroines waged war.
In addition, this TSE uses science, technology, engineering, art, math (STEAM), and creative writing, to inspire classrooms to venture back to the 1940s. There, students will make hard choices, ration goods, give up treasured items for "the cause" and much more.
Each kit comes with lesson plans and a full list of Arkansas Standards that guide teachers and meet state requirements.