How did the founding of the American colonies lead to a revolution? Use the essential question and sample activities to guide learners through a series of history lessons. Additionally, the packet includes effective strategies to...

The adventures of the New World came at a cost for Native Americans. Scholars investigate the economic side of settling the European colonies. Using video clips, statistical evidence, and primary sources, they create hypotheses and...

Learners research information about the Mayflower, Pilgrims, the Plymouth Colony, the Wampanoags, and the first Thanksgiving. They take an online tour of the Mayflower, interpret timelines, create a postcard, and compare and...

Learn about the first Thanksgiving with a unit centered around the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians. First graders read and discuss books, create a mural, complete a worksheet about five blessings in their life, prepare...

Looking for resources that explore alternative perspectives of the Christopher Columbus story? Check out the images, videos, cartoons, primary source documents, and other texts in a packet designed to spark...

Students research the pilgrims in terms of why they left England, their voyage to America, the challenges they faced when they arrived, and their relationship with the American Indians. To conclude this unit, the students have a...

Someone finds a time capsule 100 years from now, and it includes your family photo album. What would the photos tell that person about you and your place in history? Scholars investigate how artifacts tell stories. Using photos, maps,...

Students develop an understanding of the ways in which different people can use, relate to, and understand an object. Students look at each artifact collected in this lesson plan. For each artifact, the students describe how members of a po

This lesson focuses on Native American myths including the creation myth "The Earth on Turtle's Back." It includes links to the above myth, a self-assessment quiz, and an assignment for a mini-report over a Native American tribe.

This unit explores the documented perceptions of Native Americans, religious faiths, physical challenges of new lands and how the combination of immigrants and Native Americans shaped the New World. Click on "Activities" for related...

This lesson focuses on the assignments for the unit on Colonial Literature. It features a list of reading assignments, thought questions, a mini-research project assignment, and links to websites on Native American Culture and Native...

This lesson is an introduction to a unit on Colonial Literature including Native American oral literature and New England Puritan narratives, journals, and sermons. It features an interactive list of terms for the period, a link to the...

This lesson focuses on William Bradford and his Of Plymouth Plantation, a history of the Plymouth Colony. It features a short biography of William Bradford including his trip to America on the Mayflower and being elected long-term...

Learn about the struggle between the native tribes and the Spanish missionaries during the Spanish Colonial era in Texas from 1690 until 1821.

Copper plate engravings offer one example of the racialization of colonized peoples. At the turn of the 17th century, most Europeans' visual conceptions of the Americas came from the engravings of the workshop of Flemish print-maker...

Two Spanish accounts of enslaved Indians in the Caribbean and enslaved Africans in Mexico and statements of the difficulty of maintaining slavery and the lurking threat of a slave revolt.

In the middle of the 18th century, a series of evangelical religious revival movements swept across colonial America. Known as the First Great Awakening, the movements were characterized by emotional religious conversions from a state of...

[Free Registration/Login Required] Advanced placement U.S. History learning module on the emerging colonial and native societies between 1607-1754. Resources for students include video, essays, timeline and primary source documents.

The Powhatan are Native American people from Virginia who share an Algonquian language. In 1607, the Jamestown settlement in the Virginia colony became the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. At the initial arrival of the...