Overview
In this experience, students review and reinforce key learning from the unit through reflection, vocabulary, and content practice. First, students activate their knowledge by reflecting on big ideas and takeaways from the unit. Then, students work with a partner to review key vocabulary terms using flashcards and apply their understanding through a collaborative task. Next, students repeat this structure with important content from the unit, using flashcards and an interactive activity to make connections across what they’ve learned. Finally, the Elaborate scene invites students to extend their learning through an optional writing activity that asks them to respond to big-picture questions, followed by a short exit ticket aligned to key standards.
Estimated Duration: 45–60 minutes
Vocabulary Words and Definitions:
- motivations – the reasons or goals that cause a person or group to act or behave in a certain way
- Columbian Exchange – the transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and ideas between Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the 1400s and 1500s
- colonization – the process of a country taking control of land and people outside its borders, often by force, and sending its own people to live there
- joint stock company – a business where many investors each own a small part, sharing the costs, risks, and profits of starting a colony or other large project
- Pilgrims – a group of English Separatists who traveled to North America in 1620 and founded Plymouth Colony to practice their religion freely
- triangular trade – a system of transatlantic trade that connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas and involved the exchange of goods and enslaved people between the three continents
- representative government – a system where citizens elect leaders to make laws and decisions on their behalf for their community or nation
- The Middle Passage – the forced journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, on the middle part of the triangular trade, where they endured violent and deadly conditions on slave ships
- compact – a formal agreement that sets rules or organizes how people or groups will work or live together
- convert – to change one’s religious beliefs, usually by adopting a new religion or switching from one religion to another
- cultural diffusion – the spread of ideas, beliefs, and customs from one culture or group to another
- colony – a land controlled by a foreign country, and occupied by people who have settled there from that country
- cash crop – a crop grown mainly to be sold for profit rather than used by the farmer for food or feeding livestock
- mercantilism – an economic policy in which a country increases its wealth and power by controlling trade and exporting more than it imports
- plantation – a large farm that grows a single cash crop for sale and often relies on enslaved or low-paid labor
- treaty – a formal, written agreement made between groups or nations, often created through negotiation, to keep peace, share resources, or solve problems
- legislative body – a group of people chosen to make or change laws for a colony, state, country, or other place with the power to govern itself
- self-government – a system where people have the power to make their own laws and run their own affairs without control from an outside authority
- chattel slavery – a system in which enslaved people are treated as property for life, with no rights, and can be bought, sold, or inherited
- enslavement – the act of forcing someone into slavery or the condition of being held as an enslaved person
- enslaver – someone who forces an individual or group into slavery and claims ownership over their lives and labor
Objectives:
- Reflect on and apply key vocabulary and content knowledge from the unit
- Demonstrate understanding of major unit concepts through collaborative and written review activities
In this experience, students are asked to engage in group work and discussions. The experience is intentionally designed around questions that will elicit discussion, thinking, and application of learning as a review of the unit.
Throughout this unit, you’ve explored how and why European nations set out to explore and colonize the Americas and how those actions changed the lives of people across three continents. The motivations behind exploration were powerful, and the outcomes were complex. In this lesson, you’ll reflect on what you’ve learned and what feels most important to understand about this time in history.
Objectives:
- Reflect on and apply key vocabulary and content knowledge from the unit
- Demonstrate understanding of major unit concepts through collaborative and written review activities
After students complete their individual reflections, consider facilitating a whole-class or small-group share-out. Ask several students to explain what they chose as most important and why. Encourage classmates to respond to each other’s ideas by making connections, asking follow-up questions, or offering alternative perspectives. This discussion helps deepen thinking and allows students to see how others interpreted the relationship between motivations and outcomes in European exploration and colonization.
