Colonial America Worksheet

Four hundred years ago, most of what is now the eastern United States was a string of small farming towns and busy little ports. This Colonial America Worksheet introduces third graders to those towns and to the people who built them, from the first lasting English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 to the thirteen colonies that later became the first states. The passage stays close to daily life, so students meet the period through work, food, and trade rather than through dates alone.

This 3rd grade america worksheet is built as a three-page reading set. Page one holds an original, on-grade passage of about 230 words beside a painted picture of a colonial harbor, with wooden ships tied along the dock and barrels waiting to be loaded. Page two asks four fill-in-the-bubble questions that move from recall to meaning: what Jamestown was, what the word colony means in the text, what a cooper made, and why the docks mattered to the colonies. The last item is a short written response with ruled lines, so students answer in their own words. Page three is a complete answer key with a model response, which makes this an easy sheet to assign as morning work, a social studies center, or homework.

What’s Included

• 1 print-ready PDF worksheet
• Answer key
• An original 3rd grade passage about the thirteen colonies and colonial work
• 4 multiple-choice questions and 1 written response

This Colonial America worksheet helps in three ways. First, it teaches vocabulary that social studies units lean on all year, defining colony, settler, blacksmith, cooper, and miller inside the sentences that use them, so students learn the words in context instead of from a list. Second, every question can be answered from the text, which builds the habit of going back to the passage for evidence rather than guessing. Third, the written response asks for a reason instead of a single fact, so students practice explaining an idea in a complete sentence.

Bring the colonies into the room. Ask students to pick one colonial trade from the passage and act out a day of that work, then guess which trades their own town still needs today. A wall map helps too: mark Jamestown and Plymouth, count the thirteen colonies along the coast, and trace the route a barrel of flour would take from a farm to a dock to a ship. At home, families can talk about chores, compare them to the chores colonial children did before school, and decide which jobs would have been hardest without electricity or running water.

Related Resources

• The American Colonies Worksheet
• Mayflower Compact Worksheet
• American Revolution Worksheet
• 50 States Song (Have Fun Teaching)