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.

Making and eating fry bread is a special event for many Native American people. People began to make fry bread because sometimes in the past they only had a few things to make meals with. This lesson leads students through the history and heritage of fry bread with the book Fry Bread– A Native American Family Story by Kevin Noble and consider the similies and metaphors within the story, and then reflect on family traditions in their own culture and household through a flowchart of pseudocode. This lesson was created through a partnership between CodeVA and the Virginia Tribal Education Consortium (VTEC). 

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.