Classical Conversations will be moving into Cycle 3 this fall which means we’ll be covering U.S. Geography and U.S. History in Social Studies. Because the memory work starts with Columbus, I decided to cover Native Americans this summer with the kids since they are a large part of our history. I think it’s funny that U.S. History always seems to start with the beginning of European influence.
I’ll be covering the specifics of our hands-on projects in other posts, but wanted to document some of the resources we found particularly useful.
We started our unit by reading through the Powerpoint presentation found here. We have a laptop with PUSH2TV
I digress.
From there the kids moved into some age-appropriate activities:
Grade 3: A math exercise to demonstrate the ability to read a chart.
Grade 1: Native Americans-overview and Bison Activity.*
Preschool: Tee Pee Coloring Page. This isn’t the actual one we used, but close enough since I can’t find the one we used. The point was to talk about shapes found in the picture.
Everyone: We talked about how Native Americans used symbols to graphically tell stories. We looked at some examples. Then we used sidewalk chalk on our patio to create our own stories in symbols.
*Instructions: Have the student draw something for which the Native Americans used Bison (i.e., meat, clothing, tee pees, tools, and weapons).
We made up this song to help Mia remember:
sung to the tune of BINGO.
The Native Americans had an animal and BISON was his name-o.B-I-S-O-N, B-I-S-O-N, B-I-S-O-N, and BISON was his name-o.The animal roamed around the plains…<clap>-I-S-O-NThey hunted it to eat its meat…<clap>-<clap>-S-O-NThey used the fur to them warm…<clap>-<clap>-<clap>-O-NThey used the skin to make tee pees…<clap>-<clap>-<clap>-<clap>-NThey used the bones to make their tools…<clap>-<clap>-<clap>-<clap>-<clap>
Other sites I found helpful when planning activities were:
- http://www.theteachersguide.com/nativeamericans.html
- http://www.carnegiemnh.org/online/indians/about.html