Essential Question: What can geography teach us about the United States?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students work in pairs to label features on maps and a diagram. They define geographic terms and apply them to the geography of the United States.

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Essential Question: How did American Indians adapt to different environments in North America?

In a Visual Discovery activity, students work in pairs, using maps and photographs to trace migration routes of the first Americans and to summarize how these groups adapted to different environments.

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Essential Question: How and why did American Indian cultural regions differ?

In a Response Group activity, students analyze historical artifacts from different American Indian groups and then compare and contrast life in the various regions.

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Essential Question: What did explorers take to and from the New World during the Age of Exploration?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, pairs take on the role of underwater archaeologists to examine objects from an explorer's sunken ship and categorize them as navigation tools, motives for exploration, or new products from the Americas.

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Essential Question: How did exploration of the Americas lead to settlement?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students use an illustrated classroom matrix to organize information about European explorers and then play a game in which they answer questions about the explorers.

Essential Question: What challenges faced the first English colonies?

In a Visual Discovery activity, students analyze images of Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth to create act-it-outs that show why settlers came, the hardships they endured, and the reasons why each settlement succeeded or failed.

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Essential Question: How were the three colonial regions alike and different?

In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, students create a billboard for one of six British colonies and then try to persuade other students to settle in their colony.

Essential Question: What was the impact of slavery on Africans?

In a Response Group activity, student groups analyze and respond to three dilemmas faced by Africans during enslavement: trading slaves for guns in West Africa, surviving the Middle Passage, and living as a slave in the colonies.

Essential Question: What were key parts of life for Southern colonists in the 1700s?

In a Writing for Understanding activity, students take a "walking tour" of colonial Williamsburg to examine aspects of colonial life, such as government, social life, and religion.

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Essential Question: What British actions angered the colonists in the 1700s?

In an Experiential Exercise, students plan a class party and then experience frustration when the PTA places restrictions on the party. Students relate their feelings to those of the colonists and then match metaphors of parent-child conflicts with key historical events.

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Essential Question: What were the arguments for and against colonial independence from Great Britain?

In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, student groups represent six historical figures in a panel debate between Loyalists and Patriots.

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Essential Question: What are the main ideas in the Declaration of Independence?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students examine objects on Thomas Jefferson's desk, such as a letter and an invitation, to learn about the events and ideas that led to Jefferson's drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

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Essential Question: How did the colonists win the American Revolution?

In an Experiential Exercise, students engage in a tug-of-war that demonstrates factors that helped the American colonies win the American Revolution.

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Essential Question: What are the key features of the U.S. Constitution?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students play a game in which they are presented with a series of situations that the government might face and determine which branch or branches of government will resolve each situation.

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Essential Question: What are the basic rights and freedoms of the American people?

In an Experiential Exercise, students work in small groups to create tableaux vivants, or living scenes, to represent key amendments in the Bill of Rights.

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Essential Question: How did the expansion of the United States affect people inside and outside the country?

In an Experiential Exercise, students act as 19th-century settlers and migrate into the western territories of an outline of the United States.

Essential Question: What drew new settlers to the western part of the United States in the 1800s?

In a Problem Solving Groupwork activity, students create interactive dramatizations about the experiences of six groups of people who lived in or moved to the West in the 1800s and how these groups were helped or harmed by the westward expansion of the United States.

Essential Question: What factors helped drive apart the North and the South in the mid-1800s?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students use a metaphor to compare prewar events with a story about a brother and sister who disagree. Then students complete an illustrated storybook to reflect the growing tensions between the North and the South.

Essential Question: What factors contributed to the outcome of the Civil War?

In a Writing for Understanding activity, students take a "walking tour" to visit five sites at the battlefield at Gettysburg in July 1863 and examine and take notes on written and visual information about aspects of the Civil War, such as military tactics and technology and combat conditions.

Essential Question: How has life in the United States changed since the Civil War?

In a Social Studies Skill Builder, students work in pairs to create an illustrated timeline of seven key historical periods since the Civil War that have changed life in the United States.