Early American History Word Wall
Have you ever used an Early American History word wall before? Word walls can be a helpful tool your students can use to remember and better understand the vocabulary words that connect with whatever historical topic you’re teaching. In this previous blog post, we’ve briefly discussed word walls, however, we wanted to give a more thorough guide on how to use them in this post, as well as share examples that pertain to early United States history.
Creating a Word Wall
The first step in creating a word wall is choosing which words to use and how you want each card to look. There are multiple ways to do this, depending on your preference. Some cards just have the word, some add a definition, and some include an image. In our teaching experience, we’ve found the most helpful cards use all three, which help support our visual learners. We like including definitions because it can create a “dictionary wall” that students can refer back to throughout the year. You can find examples of our word wall template here.
Once you have decided which words you will include, you will then decide how you want to organize them. You can see a few examples in the pictures below.
Vocab Word of The Day
To break up your Early American History vocabulary words into smaller, more doable pieces, consider our strategy of teaching one word per day. Going over the vocabulary words at a gradual pace will allow you to go into more depth with each word. You could even use this as part of your daily warm-up activity!
Organizing by Theme
Another option is to organize your words by theme. While teachers of younger students may organize words alphabetically, consider instead organizing by theme to help students make connections. For example, you might create categories of people, places, events, documents, and more! For your convenience, our Early American History Word Wall cards are color-coded by historical timeframe. So while using this method, students would still have a way to remember which word belongs to each historical point in time.
Early American Word Walls for Each Unit
The main method we’ve used in the past is breaking up our word walls by unit. This especially works well if you have limited wall space. Simply display the words for each Early United States History unit all at once on a bulletin board or area of your classroom. To make life easier, there’s usually a couple students who would love to help you change out the board once they’ve finished an assignment.
If you’re interested in checking out our Early American History word wall cards, check out our epic bundle or any of our individual sets below!
First Americans Word Wall
European Exploration Word Wall
Thirteen Colonies Word Wall
American Revolution Word Wall
Constitution Word Wall
New Nation Word Wall
Age of Jefferson Word Wall
Age of Jackson Word Wall
Industrial Revolution Word Wall
Age of Reform Word Wall
Sectionalism Word Wall
Civil War Word Wall
If you need to cover more topics of American history, we have a blog post featuring the second “half” that is available here.
Are you looking for some new teaching ideas to engage your students in your social studies class? If so, you’ll love our FREE guide: 5 Creative Projects to Ignite Student Engagement in Your Social Studies Class. These activities have both printable and digital options and can work for any social studies subject!
