Native Americans by Region

Native Americans by Region

As we did these I didn’t think to save them to share online. I’m going to try to do some general ideas we used below but in many cases I don’t have links and I may be forgetting some things.

I used The Very First Americans book for this unit.

We talked briefly about original North/South America inhabitants possibly coming via the Bering land bridge. I found information that led me to believe the very first people in the Americas were likely Aboriginal so I integrated that idea into the lesson. I plan to flesh those ideas out more and research myself when we cover that period in history in the future.

We focused on present day US Native Americans. For each regional area we talked about the resources available in the environment and how it determined the lifestyles of the people.

Northwest
We read the Northwest portion of the book focusing on the main idea of resource use.

We could have done a lot on whaling as there are some neat plans and ideas online. We didn’t both because I wasn’t focusing long on each group and also because I’m going to use those ideas in a later unit I think. I selected an easy totem pole craft and viewed and talked about Totem poles as outlined in the Core Knowledge Kindergarten Lesson Plans for November art. This selection highlights the use of the resources available and their skill in woodworking.


Southwest
We read the Southwest portion of the book talking about the resources available in that area.
I had found a video covering this regional group. You can make homes using adobe bricks. I decided not to do this at this time for several reasons but if I had I would have used clay for my bricks. Playdough works well enough for me but isn’t particularly educational in terms of adobe homes being sun dried bricks. If you’re up for the expense though Walmart sells Terra Cotta colored clay with their playdough, modeling clays, etc. that I noticed after I had completed the unit. I think it was Crayola if I remember correctly.

Woodlands:
We read this portion of the book. We were studying the Wampanoag in a later unit so for our activity I decided to focus on the varying types of houses in these groups and making a longhouse seemed like the best craft though there are so many alternative ideas available. In searching for the longhouse idea to link in this blog post I found this site. I would have used it for each of the groups had I found it I think. It’s neat.

Plains
We spent a little more time on this group/region specifically compared to the others. The Core Knowledge plans have study of a particular regional group rather than each group in detail.

We read this portion of our book and I used select youtube videos for this portion. There are many videos especially for Sioux groups. I’m going to try to link some. That said, I had viewed tons of links and videos in the course of planning these units and I know some I previewed weren’t good. It’s hard to determine what I used and what I just viewed! It’s easy to find lots of information for these groups. I * think * we viewed this one though I’m not certain. We used some videos from this user for language and I know we viewed a video of traditional dancing from the late 1800s.

There are so many crafts (specifically shield covered here to touch on wars between tribes) and we made jewelry as well I know and something else clothing related that I can’t recall now.


Our literature day was the Sioux Legend of the Jumping Mouse much as outlined in the Core Knowledge Baltimore Literature Lesson plans for Kindergarten in November.

To finish we made a model with tepees, buffalo, and horses. We made the tepees and used drawn and cut out pictures for the other two because one son really wanted to do that instead of our animal figure horses and image search buffalo. I thought they would never stop with the tepees! It cemented the points I wanted them to remember from this culture.