Empresarios Activity: How Much Land?

How Much Land? Is one of my favorite activities! Kids get seriously engaged in this activity. In the activity students learn about the process to divide out land in an Anglo Empresario colony in Mexican and Spanish Tejas. This activity uses group work, kinesthetic dice rolling, math computation, and map skills.

I meet the students at the door and hand them a copy of a land deed as they are coming through the door. There are 4 different deeds so I just print as many copies of those four as I will need and keep them in a shuffled order. When the lesson starts(after going over directions and expectations) students find other members of their colony and group together. They then use the document to determine how much land they get based on the stipulations in the empresario grant, which are actual requirements from 1800’s Tejas. They then claim their plot of land on the map of their colony.