As a culminating activity for our exploration of the Early English Settlements, our students worked in collaborative groups to create their own colony. This was a project Angela and I had done a couple years ago. but we made changes to it based on the needs of our students. Initially, in 2015, Angela and I threw this project together over a lunch hour. We were looking for a way for our students to apply some of the concepts they had just learned during our research on Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth. I blogged about this adventure back in 2015, the last time we taught 5th grade. You can read that blog post HERE.
The kids thoroughly enjoyed the project, and it went over well. While our students were tackling the inquiry project, they provided us with some great new ideas and we made changes for them on the spot. We knew when we introduced the Create Your Own Colony project this year, we'd want to revisit and make changes based on the feedback from our last cohort of kids. Their feedback is invaluable, and always makes the projects more engaging.
I'm re-posting today, in case you want to check out our updated "Create Your Own Colony" project to use in your classroom! As mentioned above, we used this while learning about Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth, but it could easily be incorporated into a study of the 13 Colonies as well. We left it pretty wide open, giving the students the autonomy to design and share their colony in any way. Knowing that some classrooms may need more structure, we did include planning pages that students could use to organize their thinking, or tackle the project in a step by step sequence. That wasn't as important to us, we really just wanted to see the students collaborating and brainstorming ideas on their own, but you may have groups or individuals that need more structure.
As always, if you have questions, concerns, or ways to make this project even better, please reach out!
