The student will apply social science skills to understand the factors that shaped Colonial America by describing colonial life in America from the perspectives of large landowners, farmers, artisans, merchants, women, free African Americans, indentured servants, and enslaved African Americans, by creating a computational artifact.

This activity should be used as a review for the reasons why colonists came to the New World. After the context clues are filled in, students will choose a photo from Google Images that represents each of the colonies that came to the new world.

Description
Overview: The growth of tobacco, rice, and indigo and the plantation economy created a tremendous need for labor in Southern English America. Without the aid of modern machinery, human sweat and blood was necessary for the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of these cash crops. While slaves existed in the English colonies throughout the 1600s, indentured servitude was the method of choice employed by many planters before the 1680s. This system provided incentives for both the master and servant to increase the working population of the Chesapeake colonies.
Subject: U.S. History Level: Middle School
Material Type: Diagram/Illustration,
Reading Provider: Independence Hall Association Provider Set: US History Date Added: 10/16/2014
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Language: English Media Format: Graphics/Photos, Text/HTML

This activity allows students to act as historians. The student will analyze various primary documents to determine the cause of "The Starving Time" in Jamestown, Virginia. Once the students have analyzed the sources, they will be asked to write a paragraph to explain their conclusion.

Students will read the excerpt from Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative and first analyze the primary source using the SOAPSTone method. Students will further analyze the source to identify the conditions of the Middle Passage from the point of view of an enslaved African. Students should pay particular attention to the purpose of the narrative and be able to identify the way in which Equiano attempts to convince the reader of the injustice of slavery.

This short article, produced by historian Dr. David Toye for the Saylor Foundation, describes the employment of indentured servants and slaves in the different regions of the American colonies.
title"Slavery and Indentured Servitude in the American Colonies" 2018 by userSaylor Academy
under license"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0"

Students will simulate the taxes placed on the colonists without having representation and visually represent the loss of wealth for the colonists and the wealth gained by Parliament and the Monarchy by using Google Sheets to create charts. 

Students will complete the organizer by describing life in the New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies, with emphasis on how people interacted with their environment to produce goods and services