The Sign of the Beaver

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Life for American colonists in Maine in 1768 was dangerous. Consider the differences between your daily life and what life was like for early American settlers living on the frontier. What modern conveniences do you have that the settlers did not?

Teaching Suggestion: Settlers had their own ideas about how to best live in the Maine woods and, like Matt, often learned that they were unprepared to survive there. Students may benefit from a discussion about how they might feel in the wilderness without the tools they’re used to.

• “Daily Life on the Frontier”  is a student-accessible short article about the hardships and dangers of frontier life. This overview describes the basic problems faced by all settlers between the 1600s and late 1800s, as tools and technologies only marginally improved. This article relates to the theme of Overcoming the Dangers of the Forest.
• “Peopling Maine” offers a short overview of European colonists and their motives. Derived from a longer article about the history of Maine—a project of the Maine Historical Society—the page also mentions the competition between French and English for control of Maine’s territory.