Schedule an ATHM educational program for your students, and help them discover the many aspects of the history, science, and art of textiles in America. Textiles have influenced our lives from the hand-mades of earliest times up through the mechanized Industrial Revolution, and into the extreme science of the cutting edge present. The American Textile History Museum’s educational programs help students and life-long learners alike connect to America’s diverse textile heritage with engaging interactive experiences, objects, and displays that stimulate creativity, problem solving skills, curiosity, and excitement for this vibrant field.
Threads of Learning is a series of interactive school programs that help tell America’s textile story utilizing the Museum’s extensive collections and expertise. All programs address specific curriculum standards with age-appropriate activities, and are designed to complement and enhance classroom learning. Students will remember the day, the sights and sounds, and the concepts they engage.
Also, we can travel to you with our interactive Traveling Textiles programs, which are generally 1 hour in length (adjustable to your class times and schedules), and include both a hands-on activity and lesson. These programs can also be presented at the Museum if you wish to combine any of them with a tour of our core exhibit for the same price as an at-the-Museum program.
All programs include a Teacher’s Guide with program specific pre- and post-visit lesson plans and additional activities to help teachers get the most out of the main museum or classroom visit. All guides identify program specific connections to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. Download your teacher’s guide by clicking here.
Grades 2-5
Immerse your students in Colonial Era life in this highly interactive program. Students rotate through hands-on stations featuring weaving, flax processing, crafts, games, and dress-up, as they experience by “doing” the life style of a 1770’s youth. Interview a colonial spinner, and see how colonists could turn raw wool into wearables. Introduction includes map work, review of the Age of Exploration leading to colonizing of New England, and the social and political climate of the time. Emphasis on mental math and simple machine identification. [NOTE: Unlike our other programs, this special program is available for a month each spring and fall only – call for scheduling information.]
Grades 2-5
Using our interactive floor map, students will explore the world of the NE Woodland Indians and colonists from just before First Contact through their early experiences and interactions using the theme of how goods and services were exchanged. Learn the ins-and-outs of colonial bartering, and the important part textiles played. Find out what a Wampanoag or colonist might want or need from the other, and how much and what they would give for it. Students will learn loomless weaving to create hemp friendship bracelets embellished with glass “trade” beads. Meets Native American MCAS requirements.
Grades 2-5
Find out how scientists learned to spin like spiders and silkworms, recreating their extrusion process to make the synthetic cloths of today. Trace silk production from its discovery in Ancient China, and spread over the Asian “Silk Road.” Students will learn “spider web geometry” to create spider webs of their own design on geoboards, make “felted” silkworms, receive silk cocoons to take home, and will connect this to modern Rayon, a synthetic imitation of silk.
Grades 2-5
Role play a Colonial New England community! Students will take part in a “workers web” to learn about wool processing, and the economic specializations and interdependence in producing goods and services in a 1700s New England village. Students will use simple tools for picking, carding, spinning, and weaving wool as done in this time period, and create a wool processing poster with their samples.
Grades 3-10
Learn how recycling is used in the textile industry to make cloth, and consider its ecological impacts. As a colorful and educational keepsake, students will fill “ecological containers” with layers of materials showing the steps of the scientific process invented to convert plastic soda bottles into knitted fleece fabric. Students will do experiments revealing material characteristics and illustrating advances from nanotechnology research used to make modern fabrics even better!
Grades 4-10
Discover how the popular cotton cloth known as calico was first printed using wooden blocks, and how the machine process evolved. Try your own hand at designing and creating a sample book of printed calico fabrics.
Grades 6-12
In a hands-on lab setting, work in teams to problem-solve how to overcome the technical difficulties experienced by the early US cotton industry, and experience the challenge of inventing that transformed the US during the early Industrial Revolution. Figure out Eli Whitney’s inventors’ success secrets as you engineer your own solutions. A world events timeline provides an international perspective.
