Grade Level: 5

My Goals for the Lesson:
· Students will put themselves in the shoes of early colonists and understand the difficulties they must have faced coming to decisions that affected everyone.
· Students will work cooperatively to create their own colonies, with descriptions and rules. They will present their colony to the class and show a poster depicting it.

Connections to NCSCS:
· 8.3 Describe how governments in the United States,Canada, and Latin America select leaders and establish laws.
· SKILL IV: The learner will effectively participate in civic affairs.
Teacher Materials Needed:
· Markers for the class to use
· Poster boards for each group

Student Materials Needed:
· Pencil
· Paper

Launch:
Ask students to independently brainstorm a list of traits and laws they would want a country to have if they could create one for themselves to live in. It’s okay for the traits to be silly! After about five minutes ask the students to stop.

Explore:
Explain to the students that they will be working in groups of four to collaborate their ideas into one new country, but instead of using the word country, they’re going to be creating colonies, like the thirteen that The United States began with.  Each group will be able to choose only three characteristics/laws from each person’s list for their colony and they must decide on these together. Then the group will create a poster for their colony, illustrating what it looks like and its traits and laws. They must remember also to agree on a name for their colony. Draw names from a hat to randomly form groups of about four, as colonists did not get to choose the people they had to make decisions with all the time. Let students work out their own disagreements.

Summarize:
Each student group will present its colony to the class. They will describe each trait or law of the colony and which group members they came from, and explain their poster, pointing out physical features, names of landmarks, etc. They’ll also describe any disputes the group had and how they finally came to an agreement, if they did.

Assessment/Evidence of Learning:
Before the end of the day, each individual student will write on a sheet of paper three things that they learned from this activity. This will help the teacher discover whether they understood the perspective of early colonists and the difficulty in sharing important decisions with others, and what, if any, their strategies for problem-solving were.