The Beaches Museum is proud to offer a variety of options for bringing local history to the classroom.

Our Traveling Packs come with worksheets and discussion questions, reading materials, and activity guides for your class to make lesson planning easy. Each Traveling Pack includes an appropriately-themed craft activity that allows every student to take home a piece of history made with their own hands.

Traveling Pack: Pioneer Living – The Pioneer Living Pack’s theme is the early settlement of the Beaches. The activities in this pack cover pioneer shelter and the environment, homesteading and gardening, supplies, chores, and general daily living.

Traveling Pack: Heritage Cooking – The Heritage Cooking Pack’s themes are the culinary history of the Beaches and the lasting effects of our earliest settlers’ culinary choices. The activities in this pack cover the diets of the indigenous Timucua and Mocama people, Seminole and pioneer food sources like donax and Florida arrowroot, and homesteading and gardening in the early 1900s.

Traveling Pack: Fun, Games, and Leisure – The Fun, Games, and Leisure Pack’s theme is the amusements available to Beaches people throughout our history. The activities included in this Pack are intended to inspire your students to think about how children of the past, despite their many differences, were very much like them.

Digital PDF copies will be made available for printing and download in a DropBox folder shared with you via email when you rent a Traveling Pack. You are free to modify any activities shared with you to suit your teaching preferences. Please register to rent a Traveling Pack HERE.

Virtual Traveling Trunk “Case Study: Manhattan Beach, FL”

The Manhattan Beach, Florida case study brings into focus several themes in U.S. History during the immediate post-Emancipation and Jim Crow eras.

First, it demonstrates the local effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases when it declared that the 1875 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional as it related to private businesses.

Second, the story of Manhattan Beach highlights the purpose of segregation. Segregation was not intended to completely remove black people from white spaces. It was intended to relegate African Americans to a second-class status

Third, Manhattan Beach demonstrates the resiliency of the black community as they created alternative, black-controlled spaces for recreation, political organization, and worship.

This case study is designed specifically for use in the 9th through 12th grade classroom. It includes a PowerPoint presentation, lecturer notes, primary sources, discussion questions, and additional resources. Lessons and activities align with American History standards as articulated by CPALMS for the State of Florida.

Please register HERE.