The mission of the California Academy of Sciences is to explore, explain, and sustain life.

Here you’ll find short, lively activities to focus your class trip, or full-period lessons to integrate into your yearly curriculum.

By learning the skill of scientific sketching, students will learn to better observe and document the natural world. This simple-to-lead activity gets them closer to constructing explanations for the variation of traits seen within a species.

Lay the foundation for sketching by explicitly teaching the following techniques. That way, students will build the confidence and skills they need to sketch during science investigations.