This bulletin board, while not beautiful, adequately showcases just a few of the activities my third graders did while learning about U.S. history.  I chose one or two work samples for each time period in American history and typed up a quick caption about what we did, then stapled the caption above the projects.

We wet paper bags and crumpled them up repeatedly so they would be soft like real animal hides.  While we waited for them to dry, we did the worksheet together, then the children drew or painted scenes typical of those painted by Native Americans on buffalo hides.  THe worksheet and buffalo hides idea is from Frank Schaffer's Social Studies teaching resource book.

I got this activity from the teaching resource book History Pockets: Life In Plymouth Colony.  I put the information from the book on an overhead to discuss with the class, then they created Keeping Room dioramas.  Afterwards, they used their laptops to type up a description of the dioramas.

This is a colonial life 'webquest' I created.  All information is found on one site, so the kids were able to navigate and find the information they needed easily and quickly.

I created a simple Power Point with photos of real wagons, and printed out information from the internet to show the students what the pioneers actually packed in their wagons. Then I had the kids complete 'The Great Wagon Challenge', in which they had to decide what they would have put on their wagons if they were pioneers.

There's a book by Gail Gibbons called "Yippee Yay!" that has great examples of text features, especially diagrams.  It's included in our reading anthology (Harcourt-Trophies), so I had the kids make their own diagrams to show the equipment that cowboys and cowgirls used in the Old West.

Earlier in the unit, we brainstormed human's basic needs, and then the kids filled out the first section of the chart explaining how the Pilgrims met those needs in the 1600's.  After taking a field trip to the Old Davie Schoolhouse, they did the same for Floridians in 1917.  (Here's the reflection form we used after the field trip). At the end of the unit, they wrote about how our community meets those needs today.  You can download the chart here and change it to fit your US history unit.

At the end of the unit, students had a Home Learning Project in which they researched a figure from American History and created a 3 minute oral report and a puppet resembling the character.  The report had to be written in first person so that the child pretended to be the person s/he had researched.  The presentations were made from behind a puppet stage and the kids made their puppet's mouths move as they talked.  The presentations were hilarious and informative at the same time!

MORE RESOURCES

Germantown Academy has a really cool webpage explaining their Colonial Days Marketplace in which students research and re-enact colonial life.  They also have a Colonial Days Schoolhouse with an awesome video the kids created themselves.