Teacher Resources

At the Tenement Museum, we strive to support learning by helping students draw inspiration from the distant and recent past. Our stories of newcomers persevering through great uncertainty and hardship offer lessons on community, family, and navigating challenges together.

You’ll find a variety of Tenement Museum educator resources for in-person and virtual instruction – including lesson plans, digital exhibits, virtual field trips, writing activities, English-language learning workshops, and more.

Virtual Field Trips

The Tenement Museum’s virtual school programs offer your class a chance to “visit” our recreated apartments from anywhere in the world. Our Educators take students into the building and apartments using pre-recorded video, 360° images, and primary sources, drawing lessons suited to your curriculum to share stories of the families who lived in our historic buildings. 

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Alison Wong poses with her classmates and teacher for a class picture

Lesson Plans

With Tenement Museum resources, students become historians. Using our teacher-tested lesson plans, students engage in inquiry and learn to use critical thinking to interpret objects, oral histories, and primary sources while making history relevant to today.

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Your Story, Our Story

All students are experts of their own experiences and their stories belong in museums! Your Story, Our Story, a national storytelling project, offers students a chance to be included in the historic record and connect their experiences to those of others, to better understand the role of ordinary people in shaping the past, present, and future of our society. Students write and share a personal story, told through an object or tradition important to their identity.

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More Collections to Discover

Digital Exhibits

Visit the Tenement Museum’s interactive, digital exhibits, which provide a fascinating, in-depth historical look at life on the Lower East Side. Current exhibits include Beyond Statistics: Living in a Pandemic, Tenement Women: Agents of Change, and In Praise of Stuff: The Tenement Museum’s Collections!

Museum’s Online Collections

The Tenement Museum online photo archive contains thousands of images for teaching and exploring: try searching terms like “Lower East Side” or “Street Scene” or click “Random Images” for a surprise assortment.

Shared Journeys

Grades 6-12 and Adults
In our innovative Shared Journeys workshops, learners of English as a new language tour the recreated apartments of immigrant and migrant families and compare them to their own experiences while practicing vocabulary, listening, and conversation skills.

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A classroom of adults listens to their instructor, who is pointing to an image on a projector

Professional Development

We will soon be hosting virtual workshops for teacher professional development that will help you gain content knowledge and strategies that will enrich your classroom practice. Discover innovative ways to introduce students to the topics of immigration and migration throughout U.S. history. Dates coming soon.

Teaching Resources

We offer teacher-designed, teacher-tested unit and lesson plans where students learn to interpret objects, oral histories, primary sources, and non-fiction family stories while making modern connections – made for flexible use in your classroom.

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Educator Newsletter

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