Educator Program Search
**SPECIAL NOTICE** The RMSC Museum and Planetarium will be closed until further notice. Though our buildings are closed, we are still Open for Curiosity! Check out our RMSC Virtual Classroom, which is filled with many at-home science activities and demonstrations which align with the NYS Science Learning Standards.
Welcome to our Educator Program Search! This tool is designed to help you find the RMSC experience that best fits your needs. To begin, select your desired grade level, subject, program location, program type and/or day of the week from the dropdown menus below. Click the program title that interests you to learn more. As always, we're here to help at 585.697.1942.
Free Visits for Teachers: Teachers may visit RMSC free at any time to preview exhibits for planning purposes, and to explore the learning opportunities available at the RMSC. Free admission applies to each teacher with an ID badge. Additional charges for special exhibits and programs may apply.
Download the 2019/2020 School & Teacher Program Guide
AdventureZone
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Students explore the forces that have shaped Rochester in this exhibit that engages the mind and body.
Discover Our Weather
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Where do clouds come from? What is a "low pressure" system, and why does it sometimes mean a rainy day? What causes lightning? Experiment with the forces behind our changeable weather. Create a forecast to present on camera in the Weather Studio.
Expedition Earth
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Travel back into deep time! Discover how earthquakes and volcanoes have helped change the land and seas, resulting in adaptation or extinction.
Green Infrastructure Showcase
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Green infrastructure is a cost-effective, sustainable approach to reducing stormwater runoff pollution while delivering environmental, social, and economic benefits.
Nano
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Imagine and discover a world you can't see! Hands-on components present the basics of nanoscience and engineering, introduce some real-world applications, and explore the societal and ethical implications of this new technology.
Illumination: The World of Light & Optics
Permanent Exhibition
K-12 | Engage with more than 15 interactive stations that demonstrate exciting scientific concepts from reflection and refraction to radio waves to color temperature. Crank, spin, and illuminate to make light bend, sound emanate, and shadows dance.
Under Construction: Building Careers
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | This exhibit showcases the green technology used in the Sustainability Institute Hall (home of the Golisano Institute for Sustainability) building at RIT– from start to finish. It also highlights the careers necessary to complete the project from start to finish.
KEVAPlanks
Permanent Exhibition
Grades K-12 | Exercise student's mathematical and creative-thinking muscles as they engineer structures of their own design using thousands of these amazingly balanced wooden KEVA planks.
Flight to Freedom: Rochester’s Underground Railroad
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Immerse yourselves in re-created environments, first-person accounts, and hands-on experiences of the period leading up to the Civil War. Use primary documents to discover how Rochesterians fought against slavery.
Stories in Stone
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 2-9 | Get hands on with rocks, minerals and fossil and discover the Earth Systems that shaped our local geology.
Animal Adaptations
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades PreK-5 | Beavers, bears and birds, oh my! Structure follows function as students explore the adaptations that abound in the animal kingdom!
Erie Canal Simple Machine Challenge
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 4-8 | Simple Machines to the rescue! It's time to clear the path to make way for the Erie Canal, but we need your team to build a “stump puller.”
Light Up the Martian City: Alternative Energy Challenge
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 2-8 | Develop a system using solar and wind energy to light up a city on a Martian landscape, even when the sun is blocked by dust storms!
Freshwater Around the World
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 4-8 | Immerse your students into an engaging experience utilizing 3-D data visualization. Observe the hydrologic cycle in action on our 5 ft. interactive globe.
Predicting Weather
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 3-8 | Immerse your students into an engaging experience utilizing 3-D data visualization. Discover the complex interactions and movement of air masses on our 5 ft. interactive globe.
Plates in Motion
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 4-8 | Immerse your students into an engaging experience utilizing 3-D data visualization. Examine earthquakes, volcanoes and seafloor structures to evaluate the theory of past plate motions.
Live Science: Liquid Nitrogen—Solids, Liquids & Gases
Guided Science Museum Experiences
PreK-12 | Our coolest demonstrations, literally! This program explores temperature's effect on solids, liquids and gasses using liquid nitrogen.
Live Science: Pressure
Guided Science Museum Experiences
PreK-12 | The formula "Force over Area" is brought to life with this program about the pressure all around us and what happens when it's not.
Live Science: Hydrogen
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 2-12 | An exciting range of demonstrations displays many of the properties of Hydrogen, the number one most common element in the universe.
Live Science: Electricity Theater
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 1-12 | Two six foot tall Tesla Coils throwing 8 foot arcs of plasma (lightning) and the arcs actually play music. Our Faraday Cage can make the day of many in attendance electrifying!
Inquiry Room Exploration
Guided Science Museum Experiences
PreK | Explore science in a less structured setting as you learn and play in the unique Carlson Inquiry Room. Meet our live animals and investigate magnetism. Learn about states of matter as you experiment with vinegar and baking soda and make your own slime to take home.
Stormy Science
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Investigate the connections between weather and water processes on earth.
Insect Investigations
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Explore the wonder of butterfly metamorphosis. Learn how insects communicate and meet the live critters that make their home in the RMSC Carlson Inquiry Room.
Magnet Exploration
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-3 | Learn about magnetic fields and experiment with materials that are magnetic. Explore attraction and repulsion. Make magnets float.
Rocks Fossils and More
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Explore fossils from the RMSC teaching collection. Sort rocks into three groups and learn about the minerals that make up rocks.
Simple Machines & Fantastic Forces
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Explore simple machines while experimenting with pulley systems and ramps. Learn about friction, gravity and inertia while investigating the forces of motion.
What's the Matter?
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Explore the states of matter by comparing and contrasting solids, liquids and gases. Do hands-on experiments about liquid density and chemical reaction. Learn about polymers and make slime to take home.
Frog Adaptations
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 3-5 | Discover the ingenious adaptations of live frogs and why they’re important.
School Overnight
Special Program
Grades 3-9 | Give your class an experience they’ll never forget, a night at the museum!
Sun, Moon and Stars
Planetarium Shows
Grades K-2 | Observe the Sun’s path through the sky from east to west. After sunset, find key constellations of the season by looking for distinctive features such as Orion’s Belt. Travel to the moon, returning just in time for sunrise.
Solar System Science
Planetarium Shows
Grades 3-8 | Surrounded by the best images from recent space missions such as the New Horizons Pluto flyby projected at giant scale, students encounter the majesty, mystery and wonder of our solar system.
Self Guided Nature Walk
Self-Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
PreK - 12 | Embark on a self-guided nature walk at Cumming Nature Center!
Ecological Explorations
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 5-10 | Collect data from field, forest and pond communities to gain insight into communities, succession, food webs, and population dynamics.
Water Monitors
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 5-10 | This field study examines the features of clean water. Students will collect usable data on a Cumming Nature Center creek by collecting benthic macroinverebrates, performing chemical tests, measuring physical characteristics of one of the healthiest creeks in the region.
Nature Awareness
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
PreK-5 | Discover the beauty and complexity of the natural world through activities that engage all the senses.
Field Journal Journey
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 4-9 | Explore the complexity and biodiversity of the natural world through observation and data collection using field journals.
Focus on Native Frogs
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades K-6 | This is a fun and dirty adventure that explores the amazing adaptations, lifecycle, and habit of the native frogs in our region.
Winter Ecology
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 5-12 | January through February, examine how plants and animals adapt to winter. Hunt for tracks and other evidence of animal activity.
Introduction to Natural Communities
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 2-5 | Explore the woods to discover how all living things are connected through food chains and the relationships between consumers, producers and decomposers.
RMSC DELIVERS: Light & Color
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
PreK-12 | Explore how and why we see colors in this fun, interactive show. Experiment with color mixing and learn about the different kinds of primary colors.
RMSC DELIVERS: Polymers
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 3-7 | Explore the amazing world of Polymer Chemistry in this hands-on program.
RMSC DELIVERS: Rocks and Minerals
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 3-7 | This demonstration gives the student a hands on understanding of geology. Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks are explored.
RMSC DELIVERS: Bats
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
PreK-2 | This fun and interactive program will help your students to understand bats, and the important part they play in our ecosystem.
RMSC DELIVERS: Dinosaurs
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
PreK-2 | This very interactive program expands the students’ imagination as they learn about and “create” a fossil. Students become “paleontologists” in a mock “dig”, and then role play as dinosaurs to explore how they move, eat, and defend themselves.
RMSC DELIVERS: Insects
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
PreK-2 | This fun, interactive program will get your class buzzing about insects. Students will take on the role of dragonflies, bees, crickets, and other insects, as they learn about insect anatomy, eating habits, and how they communicate.
RMSC DELIVERS: Pressure & Force
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 3-12 | Through demonstrations students will observe how pressure or the lack there of effects everything around us.
RMSC DELIVERS: Solids, Liquids and Gases
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grade K-12 | Your class will thrill at the use of Liquid Nitrogen (-196° C), as they learn how temperature effects energy and changes matter from solid to liquid to gas.
RMSC DELIVERS: What's an Experiment?
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 2-8 | Through a mix of hands-on experiments and interactive demonstrations, this chemistry program entices students to ask questions, make observations, develop theories, predict outcomes and devise a pathway to problem solving.
RMSC DELIVERS: Electricity
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 3-12 | Your class will be electrified with hands-on experiments and demonstrations that help to explain atoms, and the role they play in electric currents.
RMSC DELIVERS: Energy
RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
Grades 1-12 | The question is: “What is energy?” Demonstrators guide students in exploring these different forms of energy, how they connect, and how they are used.
Forest School Homeschool CNC Courses
Homeschool Program
Mission: Mystery Planet
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 1-5 | Immerse your students into an engaging experience utilizing 3-D data visualization. Students will examine the topography of a “mystery planet” to develop a future mission. Observe the solar system to scale.
Animal Defense
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 1-4 | This adventure explores the unique defense mechanisms that our local animals use to protect and defend themselves.
Earthskills
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
PreK-5 | Students will discover how to tune in to nature through games and activities involving stealth and observation while practicing survival skills like shelter, fire building, woodscraft and more.
The Spice of Life
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 3-8 | Create and decode a “DNA recipe” to learn how variations in DNA lead to the inheritance of different traits. Decide what is on the menu at the “Bio Bistro” to discover how humans have an influence on desired traits.
Sound Bites
Permanent Exhibition
PreK-12 | Sounds are a part of our everyday lives and help us to make sense of the world around us. Experience how sound comes from vibrations – waves of energy that push tiny molecules against one another in pulses.
Global Soundscapes: Mission to Record the Earth
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 4-12 | Join the soundscape ecology scientists as they explore our world through sound. Listen to and learn about the sounds around us, the soundscape, and how they affect the environment. In this program with audio, video, and audience participation you can feel and view sound.
Journey of Sound
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-4 | Explore how sound travels by experimenting with tuning forks, a spouting bowl, and instruments. Investigate of sound vibrations by creating a croaking frog!
Climate and Our Changing Forest
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grade 5-10 | Explore how a changing climate affects flora and fauna, and collect data valuable to citizen science projects.
Weather Made Simple
Guided Science Museum Experiences
PreK | Immerse your students into an engaging experience utilizing 3-D data visualization. Students will investigate data on clouds, temperature, and precipitation to look for daily and seasonal changes in weather patterns.
Roving Robots
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades K-5 | Discover how robots are programmed to perform tasks. Program a robot to complete a mission in space. Build a robot to communicate to extraterrestrial life!
I See the Sky
Planetarium Shows
PreK-K | Young children learn about day and night, the Sun and moon, bright and faint stars, constellations and meteors.
Rotation and Orbits
Planetarium Shows
Grades 3-6 | Take a virtual trip from Earth’s surface into the solar system to see vividly how rotation and revolution produce the cyclical sky changes we see.
Scale of the Universe
Planetarium Shows
Grades 9-16 | Expanding our view by powers of ten, we survey the universe from human scale to the limit of the observable universe, 100 to 1026 meters. Visualizations based on real NASA data.
A Day on Pluto
Planetarium Shows
Grade 7-12 | For a fresh approach to the topics of rotation and orbits, we compare Earth to Pluto, where the day and the month are the same, eclipses can happen every three days or not at all, and seasons are extreme and last decades.
Holiday Laser
Grades K-8 | A holiday classic returns, with popular songs by Mariah Carey, Elvis Presley, Mahalia Jackson, Andy Williams, Mannheim Steamroller and others, choreographed to dancing laser light effects.
Beaver Ecology
Guided Cumming Nature Center Experience
Grades 3-7 | Discover adaptations, natural and cultural history of beavers.
Light and Waves
Guided Science Museum Experiences
Grades 6-8 | Explore how light waves interact with one another and other objects to affect what we see. Learn about different careers in the field of optics and the types of work they do. The 50 minute experience includes hands-on experiments in both a classroom and in the Illumination exhibition.
SciFiTech
Limited Time Exhibition
Grades K-12 | This interactive exhibit chronicles our progression from science fiction to science fact, and illuminates emerging technologies that are just now showing up on our cultural radar.
National Parks Adventure
Planetarium Shows
Grades K-8 | Take the ultimate off-trail adventure into the nation’s awe-inspiring great outdoors and untamed wilderness.