The ABCs of the American Revolution

Example of ABC page

Every year my students learn about the American Revolution.  This is one of my favorite topics in our history book!  The students get to learn all about what started our great country.  I try to incorporate at least one big project per quarter within a couple of our subjects and the American Revolution is one of them.  This year, our school increased the number of days from 180 to 190 which means that I have 10 more schools day than I typically would.  This allowed me to have my students work on an assignment that they would 99% complete at school.  I prefer assignments like that because that let's me know that my students did the work themselves without their parents.  (Because we all know what parent "assisted" projects look like!) haha

As I searched for something new for my kids to do this year, I came across Mr. Viens project called ABC of American Revolution project.  While this project was geared towards 8th graders, I was able to make a few tweaks to suit my 5th graders.  However, I must admit I didn't cut out too much and was highly impressed with what was turned into me.  Students were required to first research the American Revolution using plain old fashion books.  They had their history textbook as well as about 15 books I have that have to do with the revolution.  Just like the ABC book series, they had to create a page for each letter of the alphabet.  There were some guidelines though - they needed to have the following:

• 10 significant people of the American Revolution (listed in red on TOC)
• 3 geographical locations (listed in green on TOC)
• 7 key events (listed in blue on TOC)
• 6 concepts (listed in purple on TOC)

Each page had to have a graphic on the page for the letter and 8 of them had to be self-created.  This proved to be a bit difficult for some of the groups and required some creativity on their part.  In addition to the letters A-Z, they needed to have a cover page, summary, dedication page, Table of Contents, a Did You Know Page, Significant Numbers of the Revolution and of course a bibliography.  Once they were done doing their rough draft on their note cards, they had to begin typing the final draft in Google Docs.  Overall, we took over 15 class hours for my students who worked in pairs on this project.  When finished, we printed and bound their books.

An example page created by one of my students with their own clipart.

The final outcome of the books were pretty awesome and I'll admit they came up with some information that I didn't even know.

Check out an example of one here: ABC American Revolution Book

Now that we are done with this, we get to go on our totally awesome field trip to Riley's Farm to experience the American Revolution.

What cool and fun projects do you do for the American Revolution?