HS History: Colonial America, the Revolution & the Founding Documents

This year in American History we have traced the chronology starting with the Ancient civilizations of Central and South America, and surveying the Native Civilizations of North America before European Contact.

This winter/spring term we started with the history of the nearby Native Americans - the Iroquois and the Lenape.  Next we examined the Columbian Exchange, the Colonization of the Americas and the beginning of slavery. We then focused on the 13 English Colonies- their founding, their economies and their people.

By April we had arrived at a beloved and important period in US History - the Declaration, the Revolutionary War, victory and the creation of the new government. We finished the year with a close reading of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Students completed many individual research projects, looking at important aspects of these topics, and creating presentations about what they found out. In this way, the students are able to share what they have learned with their student colleagues, and we can, together, get a broader view of more aspects of the history we are studying. These presentations are the fruits of Birch students' self-directed learning.

Here are some of the research projects completed by our High School students this term:

Students researched Native American cultures and created presentations with text, graphics and sources.

Students did similar research on the English colonization in North America

For this assignment, students prepared slides for presentation in class with a script. 

Here are two examples.

In April, Birch students participated in a live, interactive presentation from George Washington's Mount Vernon: a conversation with Ona Judge*, an enslaved person owned by Martha Washington. She told us about her life on the Mount Vernon estate, and about how she gained her freedom by escaping from George and Martha's home in Philadelphia. She explained how she managed to live the rest of her life in freedom, and she answered questions from the students.

For our study of the Founding Documents, we used two web-based tools: Lessons, questions and summaries from iCivics, the online resource created by retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; and The National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution, which we used to access the full text of the Constitution as well as non-partisan explanations of the text.