We have spent a little over a week familiarising ourselves with the Ojibwe people. As well as access to their computers, the children had a couple of Ojibwe factual books:
In addition I spent an hour or so each day reading from these two books:
The Birchbark house is a fiction book written by Loiuse Erdrich. Erdrich writes from the experience of coming from Ojibwe heritage herself. The second book Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is autobiographical and relates Erdrich’s own experience travelling across Ojibwe country with her young baby. It is beautifully written and whilst we have not yet finished it, the children have learnt much about the Ojibwe people whilst listening to me read it aloud.
The first thing we did was to use the map of last week to show where Ojibwe country lies (not very, very accurately, but they got an idea of where they lived):
Throughout the week, they chose various topics to write about. The idea was to collate these writings and create an Ojibwe newsletter, magazine or newspaper. It was felt by the end of the week that we probably had enough work to fill a newspaper, so the children set about using the butcher paper we had bought for the Chaucer Chronicle to make their own Ojibwe Bulletin:
And here is the finished project:
This has been a familiar sight this week as the children admire their own handiwork and read what their siblings have been writing:
