Pilgrim Life Diary- A SS/Writing Assignment

The last chapter in our SS book that we have covered, talks about the life of the Pilgrims. During each chapter we try to do a project of some sort that can display and apply the knowledge that we have gained from the reading. This chapter we read and learned about pilgrim life in our textbook and we took to other books to learn about what pilgrim children did.

In this unit, we completed a web hunt to learn more about the life in the colonies. PBS has a website linked below that uses the picture below as an interactive lesson. The students use that site combined with socialstudiesforkids.com site to scavenge for information about how the pilgrims lived.

We also read a couple books, Sarah Morton's Day and Samual Eaton's Day. These books are very kid friendly and describe the daily life of a pilgrim child. My students then look up information on "How to Talk Like a Pilgrim." They really enjoy learning the new phrases and words and use them frequently for a few days.

Then it is off to the races they go creating their own Pilgrim Life Diary. They have to write in 1st person as if they were a pilgrim child. There are strict requirements that there must be great evidence of historical data and research throughout their journals. They must put it together in a book and it must be handwritten and have hand-drawn illustrations. (Insert disappoint kid faces when I said "No, you cannot type it. The pilgrims didn't type their diaries, did they?")

Some of them went above and beyond the call of duty of course. Here are some samples of the amazing work they came up with:

I love the learn book and the pages were so authentic on this one!! One of my favorites! 

Sorry this next one is sideways, but I have little time to fix it! Her cover is clever and very artistic.

Again, sorry for the short time and sideways picture. This male student did a wonderful job researching and basing his writing on research. Writing is the following picture. 

Again sideways, but look how fun and authentic this student was! I couldn't get any good pictures of her writing, but she did very well at talking like a pilgrim! Good Morrow! 

This is the neatest I have seen this student write! I was so proud of all of his effort and the amount of writing the students have me far exceeded my expectations. 

I liked this project last year, but this year I LOVED IT! The students really put more into researching and finding out historically accurate information to put into their story. I think that putting an emphasis on that really helped me out! It is amazing how much we learn as teachers as we teach the same things over and over. We are always tweaking and working to make things better and this is a good example of how I re-taught something the next year with the lessons I learned from the year before!