For Your Students

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.

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 the values of community and collaboration through hands-on experiences. Incorporating storytelling, music making, and imaginative play, Noah’s Ark educators invite students to connect with one another and work together as they bring this timeless story to life.
 
This tour is intended for students ages 4 and up.

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

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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 explore Jewish life in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Each class completes an art project inspired by Patricia Polacco’s book The Keeping Quilt.

Enjoy stirring jigs and rousing reels from the Scottish Highlands in this upbeat and lively performance, presented in partnership with The Music Center. Students will be transported to the eighteenth century through rhythmic drumming and the sounds of the Great Highland bagpipe, while learning about the geography, climate, cultural dress, and history of Scotland.

Winner of three Emmy Awards and two Latin Grammy Awards, The Lucky Band is sure to get your students up on their feet with music that sparks wonder and joy! This exuberant group of performers brings imaginative bilingual lyrics with irresistible pop beats to every performance.

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. 

This interactive program celebrates the incredible diversity of the City of Angels and the universal values of welcoming others, caring for each other and the world around us, and teaching and learning. 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 to inspire service learning.

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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 from around the world who have immigrated to the United States. They delve into personal stories and examine objects from various cultures and across time periods to understand the striking commonalities and stark differences among immigrants’ experiences. Through immersive storytelling, students re-enact an American immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century by going through the process of entering Ellis Island and attending public school in 1908. They learn about the harrowing challenges many immigrants to the US have faced and the courage people bring with them on their journey to find a new beginning.

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

World champion hoop dancer Terry L. Goedel brings Yakama and Tulalip stories to life through the art, sport, and ceremony of hoop dance. Sharing the stage with his daughter and granddaughter, Goedel showcases the rich traditions of Indigenous Peoples at this multigenerational performance.

This energetic performance will teach students the values and customs of Afro-Brazilian culture through the art of capoeira, originally developed by sixteenth-century enslaved African people as a form of self-defense and liberation ingeniously disguised as dance. By combining music, dance, martial arts, and acrobatics, Dana Maman and Capoeira Batuque will captivate your students at this lively production.

In an immersive archaeological dig site modeled after ancient cities discovered in the Near East, students use authentic archaeological tools to excavate, collect, and analyze replica artifacts. Then they present hypotheses about the history, commerce, religion, and cultural practices of people from the Iron Age. Participants learn how archaeologists study objects from the lives of people who have come before us in order to appreciate their contributions to our lives today.

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

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The documentary film Out of Plastic will enlighten, activate, and inspire the next generation of global citizens and change makers. Students will learn about the effects of plastics in our oceans, while also participating in hands-on activities that invite them to make a difference in our local community and beyond.

This compelling all-female drum ensemble celebrates the music and dance of the African diaspora. Their rhythms tell stories and preserve the memories and traditions of West African, Afro-Brazilian, and Afro-Cuban cultures. This energetic performance aims to deepen students’ understanding of African traditions and promote unity through a community of strong women.

Inspired by the film Passing the Torch: From Selma to Today, this program highlights key actions that led to significant civil rights gains in the 1960s and the lessons for us today. Students will enjoy a performance and hands-on workshop led by young spoken word artists, join civil rights luminaries for a rich and thought-provoking conversation, and share their own voices as they connect the past to the present and look ahead to the future. This program is presented in collaboration with the Gateway Educational Foundation and Get Lit–Words Ignite.

Sandglass Theater’s action-packed, high-energy production is a response to the worldwide refugee crisis and its impact on communities in the United States. Babylon looks at the relationship of refugees to their homelands, lost and new, and the conflicts that exist within the countries to which they flee. Using puppets and moving panoramic scrolls, five actors, singers, and puppeteers from this acclaimed Vermont-based theater company tell these moving stories in original, four-part choral songs.

Join a group of high school student artists from Social Justice Humanitas Academy (SJHA) for their participatory presentation of original photography created as the culminating project of their 2019 Skirball residency program. The exhibition Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs—which features the photographs that seventeen-year-old Kubrick took of daily life in New York—will serve as inspiration for this year’s residency. After viewing the exhibition, the SJHA student artists will use the medium of photography to tell captivating stories of everyday life in Los Angeles. This presentation will engage attending students in an active, meaningful discussion with the student artists about their artistic process, storytelling, and social justice. Attendees will also visit the exhibition Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs.