The Thirteen Colonies

Grade 4
Standards:
ISTE Standards for Students. Standard 2: Digital Citizen. Letter b: Students engage in positive,
safe, legal and ethical behavior when using technology, including social interactions online or
when using networked devices.

Objectives:
Students will follow directions to learn about a topic through a variety of technological platforms.
Students will be able to create a project to then present to the class showing what they have
learned.

Intro/ Lead In:

1. We will start the lesson by reviewing the thirteen colonies. We will ask the class to
brainstorm what they already know and share the information with the class. Then we
will have them watch a short clip to review the information we just talked about.The
students will then take a shore quiz on kahoot.it to ensure they remembered what we
have been talking about.

Method/Steps:
1. Students will be asked to brainstorm what they already know about the thirteen colonies.
2. Class will watch a video from The History Channel titled Drawn History: The Founding
of the 13 Colonies | History
3. Students will take a quiz on what they learned from the video via Kahoot.it. This website
allows students to answer a few multiple choice questions and sends the results to the
teacher for grading if applicable
4. Class will use group generator via randomlists.com to make pairs for group work coming
later in the lesson
5. Each group is designated a number which then is linked to a certain colony that is part of
the original thirteen. Since we have a small class, we will only use ten out of the thirteen
colonies.
6. Students can research about their colony using:
a. History.com or tinyurl.com/mhknbnr or Kiddle.co
7. Through the use of Coggle, students can build mind maps to help organize their
research with their partner
8. There is a link to a Screencast-O-Matic video available through youtube that will walk the
students through how to use Coggle mind maps. This page also has directions as to
make your mind map
9. Watch the youtube video about how to use coggle mind maps.
10. Students are asked to free write a newspaper article about what it would be like to live
during this time collaboratively on google docs.
11. Through the use of google doc, the students can then copy and paste their article into
fodey.com where they can generate a genuine newspaper article.
 12. Next students are taught how to make screenshots of their work to then copy and paste
their newspaper article into a culminating powerpoint with the rest of the class.
13. Students are shown an example of entry about North Carolina where they can bring all
the information they learned into one slide.
14. Students are asked to volunteer to share their newspaper article, and information they
have found about their colony.

Conclusion
To end the lesson the class with put their fodey articles into the culminating class slide. The
students will be asked to volunteer to come up and share their slide with the class.

Extend
The students have access to the powerpoint, so they can go back and look at their classmates
colony slides in order to review and learn more details about the different colonies for
homework.