North Carolina

“Tarheels”, “the Old North State”, “the Land of the Longleaf Pine”, all mean North Carolina. Here you will find a sampling of instructional resources to teach your students about the history, people and places, government, and economy of the state you live in - North Carolina!

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Related pages

• Historic Stagville: Read about the history of the plantation, the Bennehan and Cameron families who owned the plantation, the slave community, the structures on the plantation, and the effect the Civil War had on Stagville Plantation.
• A forced migration: Reading lesson: In this lesson plan, students read an article about the slave trade in West Africa, which caused the kidnapping of millions of free West Africans by slave traders. The lesson plan includes reading strategies designed to prepare students for end-of-grade reading test.
• Mendenhall Plantation: A visit to the Mendenhall Plantation shows students that there were dissenters to slavery in antebellum North Carolina. Buildings on the property include the main house, an old school house, the Madison Lindsay House and Medical School, a spring house, and a barn. There is also a restored wagon that may have been used to help runaway slaves.

Related topics

• Learn more about Civil War, North Carolina, economy, government, historic sites, history, slavery, and social studies.

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Lesson Plans

North Carolina Regions

Working in cooperative groups, the students will learn about their assigned regions of North Carolina. A list of questions will be generated. When the research is completed, the students will design a way to orally present the information to the class. This also will integrate Visual Arts and Informational Skills. (Grade 4 Information Skills and Social Studies)

North Carolina living through photos, then and now

Students will examine historical photographs of North Carolinians at work or in social settings. They will develop and share skills of “reading” photographs. Then they will use these skills to identify “historical clues” in a photo, and draw their own version of the same person or people in North Carolina today.(grade 4 Social Studies)

Spirituals and the power of music in slave narratives

In this lesson, students will read short excerpts from slave narratives describing the importance of music in the lives of slaves. Students will then learn about spirituals through listening to songs and discussing the value of music. This lesson could also work well as a collaborative unit with the music teacher.

N.C.- The Rip Van Winkle State

This lesson introduces students to Washington Irving’s short story “Rip Van Winkle” and correlates it with the history of North Carolina. In the 1800s North Carolina was nicknamed “The Rip Van Winkle State.” (Grade 8 English Language Arts and Social Studies)

Cherokee Relocation

Using primary sources from the Documenting the American South collection, students will investigate the boundaries of the Cherokee lands set for North Carolina after the Revolutionary War.(Grade 8 Social Studies)

Mountain dialect: Reading between the spoken lines

This lesson plan uses Chapter 13 of Our Southern Highlanders (available online) as a jumping-off point to help students achieve social studies and English language arts objectives while developing an appreciation of the uniqueness of regional speech patterns, the complexities of ethnographic encounter, and the need to interrogate primary sources carefully to identify potential biases and misinformation in them. Historical content includes American slavery, the turn-of-the-century, and the Great Depression. (Grade 8 English Language Arts and Social Studies)

Websites

Postcards from the Road

Glimpse North Carolina’s past and present in pictures and audio recordings of traditions, events and people from communities across the state.

North Carolina Encyclopedia

Counties and Communities, Education, Geography, History, People, State Government and State Symbols. Many of the words in these encyclopedia articles are linked to pictures. Created by the State Library of North Carolina.

North Carolina Kids Pages

North Carolina Legends, symbols, facts and people: all the information you need! Much of the regular “report stuff” is in the NC Almanac. See the special section on How an Idea Becomes a Law and Listen to Secretary of State Elaine F. Marshall read the State Toast!

America’s Story: North Carolina

Read some of the stories that make up the history of North Carolina from the Lost Colony to the Wright Brothers.

Slavery: The North Carolina Experience

Documents related to slavery in North Carolina from the University of North Carolina Documenting the American South collection.

Digital Durham: Life and Labor in the New South

Find a range of primary sources which can be used to investigate the economic, social, cultural and political history of a postbellum southern community from the 1870s to the 1920s

The Way We Lived in North Carolina

This site from the North Carolina Office of Archives & History explores the social history of the Tar Heel State from the pre-colonial period to the present.

Special Features

North Carolina History: A “Digital Textbook”

LEARN NC’s “digital textbook” for 8th-grade North Carolina history provides a new model for teaching and learning. It makes primary sources central to the learning experience, using them to tell the stories of the past rather than merely illustrating it. Special web-based tools help students learn to read those sources and ask good questions of them. And because it’s on the web, this textbook relies on multimedia whenever possible to supplement or even replace text.

Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations

Carolina Environmental Diversity Explorations are virtual field trips to areas characterized by both beautiful scenery and useful lessons about North Carolina’s environment. Our state stretches from the Appalachian mountains to the sea. Along the way you can find rocks formed when the earth was only half as old as it is now, climate zones equivalent to those found near sea level from Georgia to Canada, and plants and animals as diverse as those of any state except California.

Tobacco bag stringing: Life and labor in the Depression

Throughout the tobacco-growing regions of the American South during the Great Depression, individuals and families earned much-needed income by sewing drawstrings into small cotton tobacco bags. This website presents images and text from a report in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill documenting tobacco bag stringing work in North Carolina and Virginia in 1939.

Discover NC

Field Trip Opportunities across North Carolina

Do you want to get your students out of the classroom and into the real world? Discover NC! is your guide to local educational resources throughout North Carolina for field trips, classroom use, and student research. From here, you can quickly find opportunities near you — and then find related lesson plans and websites to help you integrate the experience into your classroom teaching.