Enhance your curriculum by borrowing exhibit-related materials from the Educational Loan Collection. This outreach program provides teachers with unique objects, background information, activities, lesson plans, and, in some cases, audio-visual materials. In an effort to help lower elementary students build literacy skills, more than 30 different topical boxes contain multiple copies of relevant children’s literature.

Borrowing Procedures
Loans are picked-up from and returned to a loading dock accessed from Carnegie Museums’ parking lot. Pick-up and return hours are between 7 a.m.–7 p.m. daily. Specific directions can be emailed upon request.

Many teachers arrange for parents to share the task of loan pick-up and return. Several school districts utilize district vans for this purpose.

Available Materials

Thematic Loan Kits
Kits generally contain specimens, artifacts or replicas, and related audio-visual and printed materials.
Download the full Loan Collection catalog.

• Archaeology: Tools and Technology
• Desert Wildlife
  
• Dinosaurs: Mesozoic Marvels
  
• Gifts from the Sea: Native Northwest Coast Fishing
  
• The Hopi
  
• The Inuit: Past and Present
  
• Inuit Games
  
• Life in Ancient Egypt: Scribes and Farmers
  
• The Monongahela: Prehistoric Pennsylvanians
  
• Pawprints (mammal tracks)
  
• Pennsylvania Botany
  
• Pennsylvania's Endangered Species
  
• People of the Plains
  
• Rock and Mineral Identification
  
• Tropical Forest Wildlife

Topical Boxes
Topical Boxes are groups of specimens or artifacts packaged as a single unit.

• African Artifacts
• Bats
  
• Bird Beaks and Feet
  
• Bird Eggs
  
• Bird Flight
  
• Bird Skulls
• Bird Song
  
• Bird Study Skins
• Coral
• Freshwater Mussels
  
• Fossils
  
• Horns and Antlers
  
• Mammal Bones
  
• Mammal Pelts
  
• Mammal Study Skins
  
• Mammal Skulls
  
• Ocean Life
• Owls
  
• Pittsburgh Rocks
  
• Poisonous Plants
  
• Rocks and Minerals
  
• Sea Shells
• Sea Turtles
• Sharks
  
• Taxidermy
  
• Textures in Nature
  
• Volcanic Rocks
  
• Whales

• Amphibians
  
• Birds
  
• Fish
  
• Insects
  
• Mammals
  
• Mollusks and other Invertebrates
  
• Reptiles