Thursday, September 29, 2016 | By Elisabeth Lawson | 204 views
Over the past month, fourth-grade students have been studying about the culture and geography of Southeastern Native Americans.
In writing and reading class, we read legends and stories of different tribes and discussed ways in which the tribes communicated. Students learned that legends were an integral part of Native American culture. They also learned that legends help to explain some kind of natural event through a completely made up story. The students created their own legends to explain a natural event. Additionally, we discussed how pictographs were often used as a written way to tell a story.
In the Southeastern regions of the United States, Native Americans would use the resources around them to put their symbols on, and often times this was done on the hide of a large animal such as a deer. Students were asked to make “deer skin” and then draw their legend on it using common Native American pictographs. Once completed, they exchanged pictographs and tried to guess what the legend was about. See if you can try!
In addition to working on creating a story to explain a natural event, other skills that were taught in this assignment were basic paragraph formation (indentation, lead sentences, closing sentences) self and peer editing, revising, identifying and correcting run-on sentences, capitalization and punctuation.
