Growing Learners | 1492: Whose Story Gets Told?
History is more than memorizing names and dates. It’s learning how to investigate the stories we’ve been told. 🌿
Designed for ages 10–14, 1492: Whose Story Gets Told? invites older learners to investigate Christopher Columbus, Indigenous peoples, and the events surrounding 1492 through evidence, context, perspective, and precise historical language.
Learners begin with the Americas before Columbus, explore the Taíno world, investigate why Columbus sailed west, and examine what happened when his expedition reached an already-inhabited Caribbean island.
But this study goes deeper than simply asking what happened?
Growing Learners are encouraged to ask:
Who created the source? What does the evidence actually tell us? What might it leave out? Whose perspective is missing? And how should we describe this history accurately today?
🌳 Inside you'll investigate:
- The Americas before Columbus
- The Taíno world before European arrival
- Why Columbus sailed west
- The myth that Columbus sailed to prove the Earth was round
- The October 1492 encounter in the Caribbean
- The language of “discovery” and what that word can imply
- A real 1493 primary-source excerpt from Columbus's letter
- How historians analyze the strengths and limitations of primary sources
- Colonization and its consequences
- Indigenous resistance and survival
- The Columbian Exchange
- Columbus Day & Indigenous Peoples' Day
- Wabanaki history here in Maine
- How commemoration and historical interpretation can change
- Building a final evidence-based historical argument
Activities include map investigation, misconception analysis, primary-source analysis, cause and consequence, historical language, perspective work, research, evidence gathering, and argument writing.
The study concludes by asking learners to use what they've investigated to answer a larger historical question:
How should we describe Columbus's arrival in the Americas in 1492?
Ages: 10–14
Length: 12 pages
Format: Digital PDF / printable homeschool resource
Price: FREE
This study is part of the Little Roots Learning 1492 History Collection, with separate age-appropriate studies for Tiny Learners, Little Roots, and Growing Learners.
Different ages. Different ways of learning. Same roots. Growing together. 🌿
