Your students are archeologists at the Jamestown Settlement.  The settlement directors (teachers) would like to include information on the new website, and the students have been asked to make a program (ie presentation) on settlers first arriving in Jamestown and their first few years there.  They must target this program to people who are not familiar with the Jamestown settlement to attract their attention and curiosity to want to see more of the settlement and get them to come visit Jamestown.  Their program’s artifact should include pictures of real artifacts, maps, etc to help explain the sequence (ie timeline) of events or tell the story of the beginning of the settlement.  They should include a brief explanation with each slide.  They will present their presentation to peers who will give feedback as potential visitors to Jamestown.

Create an American Revolution adventure story with your class! Students will be able to step back into time and think of the various perspectives of the American Revolution by creating scenarios the different characters might have gone through.

1. Have the students bring a Math graphing problem that they have been working on in class.  **This will take some coordination with their homeroom teacher in order to work! or present a simple graphing problem for them to solve.  It needs to have 3-4 variables. This is so that they can use 3-4 coordinating colors of yarn for their design.In this lesson, we will translate the bar graph chart into a horizontal graph design.  Use the numbers to represent rows of weaving. For example, if a 5 is represented in the information then color in a section of rows on the graph paper to represent 5 rows that will be woven in that color. Tell the students to use the same colors that they have on their math bar graph, when creating their graph for weaving so that there is less confusion. 

Social Media has changed how we gain information about people, places and events. Imagine if there were social media sites furing the time of Columbus, John Smith, or the Civil War.Students will use the Historical Social Media Profile template to create a profile and social media page for a historical figure. Students will use the spaces provided to draw a profile picture, write a biography, and social media posts for the person they have chosen.  

 Massive Resistance to school integration was an important part of Virginia history, but it is often not taught or it's glossed over quickly. Students will watch actual newsclips and then write a factual paragraph about Massive Resistance in VA.    In this lesson, students will explore the Robert Russa Moton Historical Site on the Civil Rights Trail website. Then they will watch original news clips of different events during the Massive Resistance Movement in Virginia. As they watch the clips they will complete a graphic organizer on the 5 Ws. They will use the information from their graphic organizer to create a well-written, complete, factual paragraph.      This lesson is designed for upper primary grades but can be used for middle school also. It covers Virginia History and US History II SOLs and English writing and research SOLs.     Feel free to modify this lesson and its accompanying documents as needed for your classes. 

In 1607, a party of Englishmen landed in a place they called Virginia. They followed in the footsteps of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had visited Virginia (which, at the time, included North Carolina) with a party of settlers in 1585. The colony founded by Raleigh’s party failed, weakened by lack of supplies and irregular contact with England.

To the people who already lived in the area, this was the land of the Powhatan Confederacy, a vast regional network of allied communities living under the leadership of Wahunsenacah (also known as Powhatan). Contact between the English and the people of the Powhatan confederacy was fraught with misunderstanding and conflict. This owed a great deal to the fact that the English were in the Americas to form a colony and make money for the Virginia Company of London, the corporation that had launched them on their voyage west. The Powhatan, on the other hand, lived out their values of kinship, allyship, and reciprocity in a way that was at first incomprehensible to the English, and that later they firmly rejected.

This teaching guide and activity seeks to introduce primary sources to students so that theyT can understand how to analyze and interpret them to make conclusions about the past. The primary sources the students will analyze are from the John Marshall House’s collection. All of the sources presented, both objects and written, focus on the theme of clothing during the Early Republic (1780-1820), the period in which John Marshall lived. This teaching guide and activity follow the Virginia Standards of Learning from 4th-6th grade, but may be applicable for other grades/ages.