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.

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 be creating a timeline outlining the important dates, events, and people tied to the beginning/formation of colonial Virginia all the way up until the Revolutionary War.

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.

English Learners with different proficiency levels will be able to practice fruits and vegetables vocabulary (beginner ELs) or Virginia Studies in a fun and engaging way.