I had already decided to carry out an overview study of the settlement and migration of the Native Americans. I wanted to get rid of the idea that the first peoples to populate America all lived in tepees and wore feathers. It was to be a one week study, so I wanted it to be large and vibrant and dealt with in such a way that they would never forget the wondrous variety of the Native American people.
On Monday I had the children read through the following books and then we met up to discuss the plan for the week:
We decided that we would read through the Native American History out loud. It had 8 chapters which meant a little under two chapters per day. We would also be reading The Birch Bark House:
I often buy books of similar ilk to the Native American History for many of our studies but I have never read them aloud to the children. I’m so pleased I did, it was a brilliant book and gave much more information and references than any of the other books. I read and the children narrated. There were 21 activities included of which we did a few. However, in terms of meeting the need for an over view of the history of the first people of America it more than met our goal.
In order to show their migration and settlement we decided upon making a large and colourful paper mache map. Size matters, I think, when it comes to maps. Somehow making a large map and building models and the like on them is so helpful to understanding and retention of the information displayed. I love watching a humble piece of card board and some paper mache mix come to life under the very able hands of my children.
First I drew a very rough outline of America with the Bering Straight at the top:
T12 followed my outline with the paper mache:
L11 painted the seas around the map:
And then all three of them divided up the land into tribes using the following page from Make It Work! Native Americans:
Once divided they painted each section a different colour, thus highlighting the different tribal areas:
Once the map had been painted the children labelled it and drew arrows to show the direction of migration.
As I am particularly focusing on T12’s writing this year, I had him do a written narration about how the Native Americans came to be in America. Each day I have given him a different writing assignment and he is coping well. My logic for doing this is that practice makes perfect and therefore I am expecting to see improvements daily. We go over each piece of work daily together and we discuss any changes he might need to make which he does there and then. I have been pleased with the quantity he is producing and the quality really is improving slowly each day:
We then discussed a topic related to the Native American culture that each child might like to focus on to illustrate how differently the tribes lived. T12 chose to explore what they lived in; L11 chose to look at how they communicated with different tribes and the European pilgrims whilst C12 was excited to be digging into their spirituality.
