For Your Students

Ignite your students’ creativity and curiosity with a voyage aboard Noah’s Ark! Inside the Skirball’s award-winning destination—featuring whimsical animals crafted from repurposed, everyday objects—students learn about the values of community and collaboration through hands-on learning experiences, such as storytelling, music making, building and exploring, and caring for the Ark’s inhabitants.

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Winner of the California Association of Museums’ Superintendent’s Award for Excellence in Museum Education! Experience a tour of Noah’s Ark specially designed to foster empathy, collaboration, and civic responsibility. In partnership with organizations like LA Family Housing, Chrysalis, and Heirs to Our Oceans, the tour focuses on one of three themes—caring for the earth, helping people in need, and protecting animals. Back in your classroom, take part in a hands-on service-learning project that builds on those themes. Select schools will receive an in-class follow-up workshop led by a Skirball educator.

Through storytelling, dramatic play, and exploration of objects in the Museum's core exhibition, students gain a greater understanding of Jewish culture. Journeying back in time, they travel a route to ancient Israel, become merchants at a trading post along the Silk Road to China, visit fifteenth-century Spain, and move into a crowded house in an Eastern European village. Each class completes an art project inspired by Patricia Polacco’s book The Keeping Quilt.

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Back by popular demand! Sing, dance, and clap along with beloved musician and author José-Luis Orozco on a captivating journey through Latin American culture. A recipient of such honors as a Latino Spirit Award and a Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award, Orozco will perform traditional Latin American children’s songs along with original compositions from his catalogue of award-winning albums.

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Experience the inspiring and creative artistry of the storytellers and puppeteers of Noah’s Ark. This original performance of flood stories from different cultures around the world will be told through puppetry, music, and movement. Let your imagination run wild and become part of the story!

Note: In order to accommodate a large student audience, this program will take place in a performance hall rather than inside the Noah’s Ark galleries. All students will receive a free pass to come back and visit Noah’s Ark with their families.

Organizations with after-school programs are invited to register for facilitated, interactive visits to Noah’s Ark at the Skirball. Tours are available on select Tuesdays afternoons, during public Museum hours, throughout the school year. Each program includes educator-led activities along with exploration time aboard Noah’s Ark. 

Schools, camps, and organizations with summer programs are invited to board Noah’s Ark at the Skirball for an interactive tour. Young visitors become a part of the Ark’s community through hands-on learning experiences such as storytelling, music making, building and exploring, and caring for the Ark's inhabitants.

This interactive program celebrates LA’s incredible cultural diversity and the universal values of welcoming others, teaching and learning, and caring for the world around us. Students make music together, discuss their own families’ cultural celebrations around a Jewish holiday table, explore major life events through everyday objects, and create a take-home project related to community service.

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Students discover the art and science of architecture by exploring the dynamic indoor and outdoor spaces of the expansive Skirball campus, designed by internationally renowned architect Moshe Safdie. Students then act as architects and civic planners as they engage in a collaborative building project.

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Students explore the experiences of people who have immigrated to America from around the world, learning their personal stories and examining related objects from a variety of cultures and time periods. Through immersive storytelling, students re-enact an American immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century by undergoing the process of entering Ellis Island, attending public school in 1908, and searching for an occupation in the midst of a bustling New York City neighborhood. They learn about the harrowing challenges many immigrants to the US have faced and the striking commonalities and stark differences among their experiences.

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Read about one classroom’s Americans and Their Family Stories experience

Explore the life, career, and impact of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the exhibition Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, based on the New York Times–bestselling book and pop culture phenomenon of the same name. This tour focuses on Ginsburg’s contributions to the expansion of civil rights and on the role models who preceded and inspired her.

This nationally acclaimed LA-based band plays hip-swiveling dance music in the traditional, rootsy style that was born out of the countryside of Brazil. In a performance featuring samba dancing and infectious Brazilian rhythms, MôForró are sure to get students on their feet!

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Jump and jive with the Louisiana sounds of the Mudbug Brass Band! Dedicated to the New Orleans “second line” tradition, the Mudbug Brass Band draws from jazz, R&B, funk, and the Mardi Gras musical heritage. Bring American music curricula to life at this performance!

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Explore the life, career, and impact of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the exhibition Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, based on the New York Times–bestselling book and pop culture phenomenon of the same name. This tour focuses on Ginsburg’s contributions to the expansion of civil rights and on the role models who preceded and inspired her.

The Skirball’s Discovery Center and outdoor archaeological dig site invite students to use authentic archaeological tools to excavate, collect, and analyze findings, and present hypotheses about the history, commerce, religion, and cultural practices of people from the Iron Age. In immersive spaces modeled after an ancient town discovered in the Near East, students will study artifacts and replicas to make connections between life in the ancient world and today.

Note: Dig activities may be moved indoors due to weather.

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Watch animated short films created by past and current student animators from the Character Animation Department of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). From the tale of a little boat that goes on a long journey to a work about code switching, each film tells a powerful story through hand-drawn, computer-generated, or stop-motion animation. After the film screening, students will participate in a panel discussion with CalArts animators and take part in hands-on activities facilitated by the animators and Skirball educators.

Get up and move with Antics a daring dance theater company that incorporates poetry, theater, and film into their performances. Speaking the language of hip-hop, Antics tells stories using elements of street dance styles, including b-boying/girling, krump, house, locking, popping, waacking, and capoeira.

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Explore the life, career, and impact of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the exhibition Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, based on the New York Times–bestselling book and pop culture phenomenon of the same name. This tour focuses on Ginsburg’s contributions to the expansion of civil rights and on the role models who preceded and inspired her.

Watch animated short films created by past and current student animators from the Character Animation Department of the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). From the tale of a little boat that goes on a long journey to a work about code switching, each film tells a powerful story through hand-drawn, computer-generated, or stop-motion animation. After the film screening, students will participate in a panel discussion with CalArts animators and take part in hands-on activities facilitated by the animators and Skirball educators.

Be inspired by this internationally recognized contemporary dance troupe, named “the company of the future” by The Joyce Theater Foundation. BODYTRAFFIC will perform lively and accessible pieces for students that demonstrate the power of storytelling through movement. This company prides itself on bringing the joy of dance to the audience, with equal measures of virtuosity, heart, and humor!

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In this high school residency, one class of students will embark on an in-depth investigation of the remarkable life and successful career of a social change-maker and cultural icon: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An original Skirball exhibition, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg—based upon the New York Times–bestselling book of the same name—will serve as an entry point and framework for the residency. Working with a professional teaching artist, students will examine RBG’s ongoing work of addressing gender inequality and develop their own creative projects that can act as platforms for action. The residency will culminate in a dynamic and participatory gathering at the Skirball, where students’ works of art will serve as catalysts for dialogue about artistic process, civic values, and social justice.