Since bison skin is rare in our parts, we opted for an old sheet. It was a little short so I would recommend 10 ft (~3.5 yards) of 60 inch fabric. Layout the fabric and cut like this.
We were fortunate enough to have leftover branches from last year’s garden structures.
We chose three to make a tripod to start our tee pee.
They crushed,
We used some yarn we had laying around to secure the top.
Then we dug little divets in the ground to keep the tripod from sliding.
We headed to the other pile of sticks in our backyard to look for some smaller branches to fill out our tee pee frame.
To decorate our tee pee, we attempted to make natural paint or dye. Each child chose something from our yard we thought would work. They found charcoal, raspberries, and beets.
We used this recipe to make a milk-based paint.
We crushed,
cut,
stirred,
and food processed.
The charcoal and beet paints made brilliant colors. I think the raspberry paint would’ve been darker if we had used more raspberries.
Either way, the kids had a fabulous time decorating their third of the tee pee.
After the paint dried, we wrapped the fabric around the frame and secured it with more string through three holes we poked at the top.
It’s smaller than I envisioned originally but large enough for the kids to sit inside and play a board game.
Head to http://pinterest.com/search/?q=tee+pee for other really cute tee pee inspiration.
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. I love the simple instructions that also include pictures.
I let PJ page through the book and choose our first project. He loves being in the kitchen so he chose to make corn cakes (found on page 24). The recipe called for corn tortilla flour (which we didn’t have) or all purpose flour (which was out because we’re trying a gluten-free diet for Ty this summer) so we used fine corn meal. The only other ingredient was water in the original recipe.
Normally the gluten in the flour would be enough to make the dough stick together but since we were just using corn meal, mixed a tablespoon of flax meal in 3 tablespoons of water to act as a binder.
I gave each child about 1/4 cup of cornmeal is a bowl. I should have put a teaspoon of salt in too. Then I let them dump their flax meal water mixture in and stir.
We added more water or cornmeal as needed to make a dough.
Then they flattened with their hands on a plate. Our “dough” more like wet sand than a typical dough. Flatter is better for cooking but much harder to get off the plate in one piece.
Next, we pan fried them in canola oil. They taste much better if you cook them until they are crispy all the way through like a thick chip.
We melted cheese on some, tried one plain, and dipped some in salsa. They probably won’t make our meal rotation but it was a good learning experience for the kids and doubled as snack!
To see other books we used, click here.
To see the overview of the unit, click here.
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If you missed the overview of this unit, click here.
]]>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