Discover resources and strategies for teaching core content areas. Explore tips, tools, and activities to enhance learning across all subjects.
Thanksgiving, despite not becoming a national holiday until the Civil War, is a time of year steeped in images of America’s colonial past. For educators at all levels hoping to use this time to delve deeper into the nation’s early history, there’s good news and bad news.
Studying American History
Studying American history — or any history, for that matter — can be a challenge. The world of the past, as continuous as it is with the present, is difficult to imagine, the lives of those before us hard to picture. And the farther back you look, the harder it might be for a student to grasp. The world of 1969 physically resembled today’s world in many ways. But the world of 1789? That’s a different story.
So, what’s the good news? As in so many aspects of education, ed tech is here to help. Not only can lesson plans, supplemental materials, and primary sources help students understand life in early American history, but modern resources can also help students experience some aspects of the period.
Here are some of favorite interactive resources to help students (and teachers) envision colonial American history.
Native American Heritage Month
The history of the early United States cannot be understood without understanding the North American peoples who lived in the Americas before European colonization, and who still live here today.
That’s why November is Native American Heritage Month. The celebration’s official website includes a broad array of resources, including Native Knowledge 360°, a project of the National Museum of the American Indian, which includes a wealth of fully-developed lessons, searchable by subject, grade level, and more.
Exploring Colonial America
The New York Public Library gathered a wealth of learning tools on their Selected Internet Resources in U.S. History page. While this page is no longer updated, it does link to The American Colonist’s Library, a massive repository of colonial-era primary sources.
The Library of Congress has a predictably huge and useful set of materials on early America, including:
- Collections: “Historical context and ideas for integrating individual digital collections of primary sources into instruction.”
- For Students: “Online activities and background information from the Library of Congress to help students learn more about Colonial and Early America.”
- Lesson Plans: “Use these lesson plans, created by teachers for teachers, to explore Colonial and Early America.”
The Junto describes itself as a blog “made up of junior early Americanists—graduate students and junior faculty—dedicated to providing content of general interest to other early Americanists and those interested in early American history. You can page through their back-catalog of pieces on digital history here.
The University of Houston’s Digital History project includes in-depth resources, outlines, and documents, as does the library site of College of the Mainland in nearby Texas City.
New York City public media’s 2004 program, “Colonial House,” in which participants live in the style of 1628, has spun off into a website with activities and lessons.
For the grab-bag approach, check out Education World‘s extensive list of online resources on the topic of colonial American history. You can also check out TeachingHistory.com‘s collection of resources on the era.
Early America on Video (and Audio)
Educators hoping to give students a living, breathing look at the 18th century should check out the YouTube channel run by Townsends, a producer of period-accurate historical recreation items from frock coats to stew pots. The episodes are usually hosted by the quietly charming proprietor Jon Townsend. Among the most popular videos are those in which Townsend cooks recipes from the colonial era using era-appropriate technologies.
Annenberg Learner also offers a video course on the period called “America’s History in the Making.”
Podcast fans might enjoy Ben Franklin’s World, an extensive series (274 episodes at the time of this writing) about almost every aspect of life in the Americas between the 17th and 19th centuries. And, if you’re a podcast lover, might we suggest TCEA’s Ed Tech Club?
Next Steps
If you’re interested in this topic, or just looking for more resources for this period in American history, you may want to look into the pages of the Omohundro Institute, the Society of Early Americanists (whose logo is, appropriately, a turkey), the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), or the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
What Is Flip?
Students begin learning observational skills in science starting in kindergarten. Though the skill is not as robust or refined as what a high school student may demonstrate, there is still great value in having them engage in observing the world around them to start taking notice of how things work. Observation is a foundational science skill that leads to communication, classification, measurement, inferencing, and predictions.
In Flip, create a grid for observations. Each topic in this grid will show a photo or video that the student is to observe and describe. Depending on the level of skill, you can require students to use previously learned vocabulary in their responses. If you want students to use words from a given word bank that you have developed for them, create the document and add it as a topic attachment to the topic. You can reference this word bank in multiple topics by adding the link to each topic. If you have a rubric to guide the students in their work, add the rubric as another topic attachment; for younger students, you may need to record a video showing the rubric while you are reading it aloud.
Go to 
Begin by creating a grid to hold your inferencing topics. As done above, create a standard set of instructions for your students. You can go to ,
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USB Microscope – Consider purchasing a USB microscope that you can connect to your device in order to take photos and videos of actual materials in your classroom…or on fieldtrips! Read the details carefully as some microscopes will work with some devices but not all…such as Android phones/tables, PC computers, and Mac computers but not iPhones or iPads. If you need a microscope that connects with your iPhone or iPad, be sure that it explicitly states that it connects. Likewise if you are wanting to connect the microscope to a Chromebook. If it is not clearly stated, look for a link in which you can ask the seller or locate that microscope on another seller’s website to see what information they provide. 
Low poly has been around for decades in the computer industry. As early game designers needed a way to generate images (and later animation) that did not exceed the available memory, they found they could reduce the file size by reducing the amount of information contained in the picture itself. This was achieved by connecting a mesh of dots to form polygons that are filled with a single color. The most popular shape to use is a triangle. This method allowed designers to easily reduce an image to mathematical terms instead of every pixel having its own color. You may have noticed that even current gaming systems are making use of the retro look of low poly. News sites may apply a low poly filter when interviewing a witness that wants to remain anonymous so that their physical features are less likely to be identified.
Identifying Angles – Because low poly can be made using only triangles, give students a page from the Low Poly Samples pdf file (link below) and have them identify whether each angle is a right, acute, or obtuse angle by writing r, a, or o in the angle respectively. For older students, have them use a protractor to identify the exact angle and have them write the measurement in each angle. Students can easily check their work by calculating the sum of the angles in the shape. The sum of the angles in a triangle will equal 180°, while the sum of the angles in a polygon with four or more sides is equal to 360°. 
Low Poly Animals – Provide animal shapes for students to use as patterns. Laying a sheet of blank paper over the pattern, students trace the image using only straight lines and fill the image in with line segments to create triangles, squares, pentagons, etc. but no curved lines. The image to the right is my work using this method.
If you weren’t able to join us this year, be sure to put 
