Classroomtools.com Lesson - The Roanoke Mystery Activity Instructions

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The Roanoke Mystery
Activity Instructions

Explain to your students that
1. they are about to simulate one thing historians do as part of their research and writing process, namely constructing coherent stories from information they've found while doing research.
2. each of the index cards you are about to distribute contains part of the story of the second attempt by English settlers to establish a permanent colony in North America.
3. they are not to give their card to any other student, although they may read its contents to anyone who asks them to do so.
Give each student one of the index cards you've printed. If one or more students are absent, hold onto their cards, not letting the others know that you are doing so. When you get to step 9, announce how many cards you've been holding, read them aloud, have the class determine where they belong in the sequence, and whether their presence changes the meaning of the story they had arrived at without them.
Instruct students that they will have until 15 minutes before the class period ends to organize themselves so that they can tell the story of the 2nd attempt by English settlers to establish a permanent colony in North America.
Let the students go to work.
Act as an observer, but not an active participant in their efforts.
When the allotted time is up, have the students present the story they've assembled.
Discuss any problems they had completing this task, how they resolved each problem, and how they might better resolve them in the future should they encounter them in similar activities.
Discuss if and how the segments could be assembled in a different order, and if doing so leads to a story with a different meaning. If it does, how might historians determine which is the correct order and meaning?
Ask students to come up with questions whose answers might make the story of Roanoke more complete. List them, discuss how to find answers to them, then have students do so and report their findings.
As a follow-up activity, you might assign students to research additional information about the 2nd colony. Have them look for story segments that were not included in the cards they assembled. When they report back (noting the new information and where they found it), does adding it to the story change the meaning they had before it was added? If so, how? Discuss whether there might be even more information they could dig up that would change the meaning yet again. If this is possible, how do historians determine when the complete story has been told, or do they ever do so?