What is history and how do we study it? Students have been asked to begin our history work by learning to ask questions. We've learned that history is learned through a wide variety of resources like artifacts, family stories, newspapers, etc and therefore, we need to ask many questions to be sure of what we are learning (and accepting). Before we can colonize the "New World" students will spend time learning about a few of the expeditions made to the Americas before the English settlements began to spread.
Big ideas that we've discussed so far: Columbus was not the first European to discover the Americas. The first people here were American Indians over 500 years before the Erikson family landed in Newfoundland and Canada around 1000 A.D. St. Augustine, Florida was the first permanent European settlement in North America.
We will only scratch the surface of the explorations to get a sense for how English settlements came to take over much of the eastern part of the United States rather than a Spanish rule like the settlers in Florida.
