Educational Programming

The Bulkley Valley Museum welcomes educators to book guided tours and programs for their classes. Our programming is formatted to meet Curricular Content areas, Big Ideas and Core Competencies across all grade K-12, encompassing Social Studies and other subjects.

Educational programs and tours can be booked by contacting the Museum at 250-847-5322, or by emailing education@bvmuseum.org.

Tour and Program Costs
  • Guided tours, programs, or supervisory assistance for summer camps, after-school care, daycare, or another instance where a fee has been paid by the participants to the visiting group organizer: Fee of $2/child
  • Programs and tours for classes from SD #54, SD #82, BV Christian School, Ebenezer School, Kyah Wiget Education Society, École la Grande-ourse or home school programs are by donation. Suggested donation of $2/child to a maximum of $40.

PROGRAMS AVAILABLE:

Broken Promises (September 2024-January 2025):

The BVM is pleased to present the traveling exhibit Broken Promises on loan from the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre. We welcome school classes to visit this exhibit to further their learning about the history of Japanese Canadian internment and dispossession. The Landscapes of Injustice website affiliated with the exhibit offers interactive resources and lessons for both elementary and secondary students. The site contains a more detailed, interactive narrative timeline with many visual and textual primary sources that are easily consulted through their Digital Storytelling site: https://loi.uvic.ca/narrative/timeline.html?initialized=true

Other available programs:
  • Fun with Fossils (Grades K-4): An interactive natural sciences and critical thinking program led by museum staff, designed for Kindergarten to Grade 4.  Students will learn about how the region now known as the Bulkley Valley developed over 60 million years and how fossils are formed through hands-on activities and handling real fossils. Classes from Grade 2 to Grade 4 also have an opportunity to make their own fossils.
  • Tools and Technology (Grades K-4): An interactive Social Studies program led by museum staff, designed for Kindergarten to Grade 4.  Students will learn about historic tools, gadgets, and technology and how they have evolved over time. In this activity, students have an opportunity to look, at, touch, and engage with artifacts from the Bulkley Valley Museum’s collection.
  • Building our Main Street (Grades K-4): An interactive Social Studies program designed for Kindergarten to Grade 4.  Students will learn about the history and evolution of downtown Smithers through an interactive photo exercise and creating a collaborative 3D model of Main Street. Older students also have the opportunity to share their display with other classes.
  • Shared Histories (Grades 8-12): This program is currently under development, and will compliment our Shared Histories  permanent exhibit. Contact our staff to learn more about this program!
  • Using Primary Sources (Grades 8-10): This program can be delivered by museum staff onsite at the museum, or in the classroom.Students interact with and analyze a variety of primary sources selected from the museum’s collection. Students will learn the benefits and challenges of different primary source mediums, the importance of context and perspective, and how to identify primary and secondary sources. This program is perfect for classes learning the basics about primary sources, and those about to undertake more complex research projects. This program incorporates the Historical Thinking Concepts.
  • Recording Oral History (Grades 10-12): An interactive Social Studies program that introduces students to oral history as a medium for research, tradition, and storytelling. Students will hear examples, learn the basics of conducting interviews, and have the opportunity to record their own.  Students will have the option to donate their interviews to the museum’s collections (with parent permission).

Do you want to bring a group to tour the museum, but not do a whole program? Is there a historical topic not listed above you would like your students to learn more about? Please contact to discuss accommodations and other options!

To book our programs contact education@bvmuseum.org or 250-847-5322.

BV Museum Digital Resources for Teachers

Hands-on History video series

Railroad Lanterns and Signals (Grades K-3). The lantern signals can also be delivered as an in-museum activity for visiting classes.

Become a Curator at Home (Grades K-6). This activity has many connections to the “Positive Personal and Cultural Identity” core competency of the BC Curriculum.

Fossilization (Grades 2-4). This activity can be delivered by museum staff as part of our Fun with Fossils program (above).

 

Our virtual exhibits include local historic photography, the history of the Spanish Flu outbreak in Smithers, the invention of the egg carton, and a Google Earth tour of historic buildings and landscapes.

The Museum also welcomes teachers to deliver their own lesson plans within the Museum, or to discuss programming ideas with staff. Teachers also have full access to our Collections Online web portal, featuring over 10,000 local historial images, as well as digitized primary source documents and artifact photographs freely available for in-classroom use.

Other Online Educational Resources

Check out the Smithers Regional GeoTour as part of the Below BC Virtual Museum. Mineral samples from the collections of the Smithers Exploration Group and BV Museum were used to create this virtual resource.