This instructional plan combined Virgina Studies SOL 4.5b and WIDA English Language Development Standards. The lesson includes several activity options. Note: Some images may not appear in the "Overview". To view all images in this instructional plan, click "download" at the bottom of the overview.

About one-third of Patriot soldiers at the Battle of Bunker Hill were African Americans. Census data also reveal that there were slaves and free Blacks living in the North in 1790 and later years. What were the experiences of African-American individuals in the North in the years between the American Revolution and the Civil War?

This primary source activity can be used after teaching students about the different groups during the Revolutionary Period such as patriots, loyalists, and neutrals.  The activity is on a Google Worksheet and includes links to primary sources online and questions about those sources. The primary sources include writings by Cato, an American farmer, and Reverand Inglis.   You can add or change questions if you so wish.  The settings can be changed as well by clicking on the settings icon at the top right corner of the screen.

The decision of Britain's North American colonies to rebel against the Mother Country was an extremely risky one. In this unit, consisting of three lesson plans, students will learn about the diplomatic and military aspects of the American War for Independence.

Understanding the Patriot attitude toward the British monarchy is helpful in understanding the Founders' reluctance to have a strong executive under the Articles of Confederation as well as their desire to build in checks of executive power under the Constitution.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Boston Tea Party. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

By exploring historical accounts of events surrounding the Boston Tea Party, students learn about the sources and methods that historians use to reconstruct what happened in the past.

Students will apply their knowledge of the causes of the American Revolution to create an interactive story via Twine. The interactive story will be based on the pre-revolutionary war period from the point of view of a loyalist or a patriot. As a warm-up students will look at an optical illusion picture and as a class discuss point of view and perspective. Students will work in heterogeneous pairs/groups to research, outline, and create a pre-revolutionary story about a patriot or loyalist.

In this lesson, student groups create a short, simple play based on their study of broadsides written just before the American Revolution. By analyzing the attitudes and political positions are revealed in the broadsides, students learn about the sequence of events that led to the Revolution

Drawing on the resources of the Library of Congress's Printed Ephemera Collection, this lesson helps students experience the news as the colonists heard it: by means of broadsides, notices written on disposable, single sheets of paper that addressed virtually every aspect of the American Revolution.

This lesson looks at Thomas Paine and at some of the ideas presented in his pamphlet, "Common Sense," such as national unity, natural rights, the illegitimacy of the monarchy and of hereditary aristocracy, and the necessity for independence and the revolutionary struggle.

This breakout activity provides teachers and students an interactive way to demonstrate their learning about cryptography, code-breaking, and historic ciphers. Clues are provided, along with additional hints you can choose to provide to students so that students solve ciphers and learn what time their army is planning to raid the enemy camp.

In this lesson, students will learn about one of the most significant and successful spy rings in American History. They will also actually conduct some of the same techniques and demonstrate them to the rest of the class.

This lesson plan looks at the major ideas in the Declaration of Independence, their origins, the Americans' key grievances against the King and Parliament, their assertion of sovereignty, and the Declaration's process of revision.

A complete listing of EDSITEment's lessons on the causes, the course and the consequences of the American Revolution and Independence

In this lesson students will examine the various visions of three active agents in the creation and management of Great Britain's empire in North America: British colonial leaders and administrators, North American British colonists, and Native Americans.

This 18-minute video lesson gives a basic overview of U.S. history from Jamestown to the Civil War. [History playlist: Lesson 1 of 26]

This lesson focuses on the American Revolution, which encouraged the founding fathers' desire to create a government that would, as stated in the Preamble, insure domestic tranquility and provide for the common defense. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences.

Art objects made and used in the past can offer clues to the ideas and attitudes that may have been prevalent at the time of their creation. Spending time to thoughtfully examine and explain their own ideas about such an object encourages students to become curious and open lines of inquiry about historical context. This interactive exercise guides students as they document their thinking about an 18th century American artwork.

What conditions provided the impetus for the Sedition Act? Partisan animosity was strong during Adams's presidency. The first two political parties in the U.S. were in their infancy"”the Federalists, to which the majority of members of Congress belonged, and the Democratic-Republicans, led by former vice-president Thomas Jefferson and four-term Congressman James Madison, who had left the House in 1796.