Today's students think of money as the currency of a nation, not as the fragmented finances of a disjointed set of individual colonies. To help students understand the fiscal chaos that can result when every territory makes its own money, you can divide your class into individual colonies and instruct each group to fabricate its own currency. Once they've drawn their money with crayons, markers or paint, they can gain a firsthand understanding of the difficulties inherent in local and regional currencies as they try to trade with or buy from the other "territories" in the class.
Artifacts help a society understand the people who owned them. Probate records provide a detailed picture of the belongings that colonists considered valuable and a glimpse into the lives of individuals who otherwise would be invisible. Once you share these kinds of records with your students, you can assign each of them to create a comparable list of belongings and ask them to contrast their lists with the historical records they're studying. You can help make probate records come to life by bringing to class artifacts comparable to the items they list and encouraging students to envision the lives in which these objects were important.
Your students may find electronic communication more familiar than its pen-and-paper equivalent. Exploring the handwriting and the handwritten records of a very different society can be a window into its everyday life. You can bring examples of colonial handwriting to class and help your students try mimicking the letter forms. You can explain how long a letter could take to travel from one town to another in order to help students visualize a time when communication and immediacy didn't go hand in hand, unlike today's instantaneous messaging.
Most children have seen too many "Thanksgiving-dinner" drawings to have a realistic idea of what Native Americans did, thought, ate or built. You can guide your students to make lists of the menus they eat at Thanksgiving, then compare their lists to the foods early settlers learned to eat, thanks to guidance from Native Americans. You also can bring some stereotypical modern depictions of Native American life to class and debunk the myths they show.