Let's Teach About Canadian Early Settlers

Teaching about early settlers in Canada is an exciting opportunity to bring history to life for students. By using hands-on activities, engaging stories, and primary sources, we can help students understand the challenges and triumphs of the people who built new lives in a vast and unfamiliar land. Below are some creative ways to engage students, picture book suggestions, and a ready-to-use resource to make this topic meaningful in your classroom. 

Engaging Activities to Teach About Early Settlers

 

1.  Let Students Step Into a Settler’s Shoes 

Encourage students to imagine themselves as settlers by giving them a scenario: "You have just arrived in Canada in the late 1800s with only a few supplies. What do you need to survive? Where will you build your home? What challenges will you face?" 

Have students write a journal entry, create a settler survival plan, or design a small model of a pioneer home using craft materials.

2.  Interactive Sorting Activities 

Help students understand the push and pull factors that brought settlers to Canada by having them sort reasons into categories. Use cards labeled with reasons like wars and conflicts, free land, job loss, adventure, and religious freedom and have students decide whether they are push factors (reasons people left their home country) or pull factors (reasons people wanted to come to Canada). 

3.  Picture Analysis And Artifact Exploration 

Show students historical photographs of early settlers, their homes, and tools. 

Ask: What do you notice in this picture? How is this different from today? What do you think this tool was used for? 

If possible, bring in replicas of pioneer tools or everyday items like a washboard, lantern, or tin cup. Handling objects helps students make real-world connections to what they are learning.

4.  Read-Alouds And Picture Books 

Books bring history to life! Here are some great books about early settlers in Canada: 

 📖  A Pioneer Story: The Daily Life of a Canadian Family in 1840 by Barbara Greenwood
 A mix of storytelling and factual information that helps students understand a pioneer family’s life. 

 📖  Pioneer Kids by Freida Wishinsky
Emily and Matt use their time-travelling sled to arrive on the Canadian Prairies in 1910. 

 📖 Discovering Canadian Pioneers by Marlene Gutsole
This books gives an overview of what life was like for a typical pioneer family in Upper Canada. 

 📖 Birchtown And The Black Loyalists by Wanda Taylor
Readers are introduced to the journey of Black American soldiers taken from Africa as slaves, their quest for freedom, the settlement and struggle of Black Loyalists on Nova Scotian soil.

5.  Make Teaching About Early Settlers Easy With This Ready-to-Use Resource! 

Bringing Canada’s early settler history to life doesn’t have to be time-consuming! 

My Early Settlers in Canada resource includes: 

✅ 8 sets of teaching slides - That is eight complete lessons - just present and you are ready to teach. 

✅ Interactive activities to keep students engaged!

✅ Engaging reading passages with easy-to-understand information. 

✅ Over 20 print activities for students to showcase their learning.

✅ Comprehension questions to reinforce learning. 

✅ Flipbook research report for students to write about pioneer life. 

This resource is perfect for Grade 3-5 students, whether you’re teaching a social studies unit or incorporating cross-curricular literacy connections. Make history exciting and meaningful—grab your copy today! ⬇️ 

 [👉 Canadian Pioneers Canada Early Settlers Pioneer Life Farming Activities and Slides 👈]

  

Social Studies Resources

I have been working away at developing resources for social studies.

Finally! I have finished a unit about dynamic relationships. This 138 page social studies unit explores the impact of geography, environment, and climate on lifestyles and settlement patterns. 

The unit includes 10 lessons:

1. Regions of Canada
2. Influences of Geography
3. Location -  Environmental and Climatic Factors 
4. Environmental Factors and Ways of Life 
5. Settlement Patterns
6. Characteristics of Geographic Regions
7. Influence of Geography on Architecture
8. Lifestyle Views of Land as Held by Indigenous Peoples
9. Ways People Interact With The Land
10. Environmental Concerns 

Each lesson includes:

• A Mini Lesson with Anchor Charts
• An Independent or Small Group Activity
• A Reflective Whole Class Discussion 

Canadian Government

This week, we have been focusing on the three levels of the Canadian government. Canada's three main levels of government are: 

1. The federal level 
2.  The provincial level 
3.  The municipal level 

Across the country, there are also band councils, which govern First Nations communities. These elected councils make decisions that affect their local communities. 

Each level of government has a different structure and responsibilities.

To help students understand the government structure, I created word cards which students organized to represent the hierarchical structure. I created cards for each level of government. A completed chart was also created for use as an anchor chart, an answer key for teacher use or student checking, or for student reference.

The cards can also be used to help students acquire vocabulary related to government structure.

The Canadian Government cards are available in my TPT store.

 

To compliment the Canadian Government Word Cards, I created a presentation. The 84 page/slides resource details the Canadian government. It describes:

• The structure of each level of government - federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal 
• The responsibilities of each of the three levels of government 
• How a bill becomes a law Canadian symbols 

The Canadian Government Anchor Charts and Presentation  is available in my TPT store.

New Resource - Canada and Mapping Skills

Struggling to teach mapping skills? I hope my new resource will help.

The resource is a PowerPoint Presentation which can be used as a presentation, a review, anchor charts, or a bulletin board.

The resource has 145 slides which encompass:

1. Various representations of the Earth
2. The continents
3. The oceans
4. The hemispheres
5. Canada
6. Canadian provinces and territories - their locale and attractions

This resource is designed to help students master mapping skills in the following ways:

• Use and interpret various model representations of the Earth, such as maps, globes aerial photographs, and satellite images. 
• Identify and locate geographical concepts, such as continents, countries, borders, hemispheres, oceans, prime meridian, and the equator on a map or globe. 
• Locate and list the provinces and territories in Canada.
• Travel through Canada to determine landmarks which define the country’s provinces and territories.

I Am Canada Reader's Theatre

The students performed their I Am Canada reader's theatre to several classrooms today. Their performance was outstanding. It highlighted our work on fluency, particularly parasody.

 

Canada

Thank you for educators around the world who express interest in our classroom and our studies.

We have been studying our nation-  its land, its history, its symbols; and the location of Canada and its political regions. Our inquiry investigates how knowing our past influences our present.

To complement our study of Canada, we are studying historical fiction. Because historical fiction tends to start at a time of great historical tension, which almost inevitably means a time of change, readers who pay attention to the feelings that a setting engenders will probably be experiencing rising tension. In most historical fiction, the setting for the story is a place that is in the throes of great pressures. 

This unit, however, is not simply a unit on reading historical fiction. It is a unit on tackling complex texts. It is not simply to entice students to be swept up by the settings in their historical fiction novels. It is to help readers be more attentive to the tone and atmosphere in a setting and more alert to gathering tensions—to the winds of change. Artifacts of learning and learning tasks will be posted soon!