I know this has been a long time coming and truth be told I just got caught up with so many other things in life and the blog world that I plain forgot to post it when we were studying Native Americans. Better late than never I guess!
Here is our unit on Native Americans for our Social Studies Notebooks. Since we did not have a lot of time to study this unit, it is not set up like my traditional interactive notebook with the learning on the left and reflection on the right. Instead of me teaching the students about the four major Native American regions, I had the students teach the lessons!
We began our unit with a graphic organizer "Who Were the First Americans" and filled in our prior knowledge about Native Americans on the left side. Then each table group was assigned a different region (Pacific Northwest Indians, Southwest Indians, Eastern Woodland Indians, and Great Plains Indians) and had to find information about the eight major topics for each (Tribes, Shelter, Music, Art, Food, Major Beliefs and Practices, Interaction with the Environment, and Interesting Facts). I let the students use the textbook, Social Studies Weekly Newspaper, the computers and anything else they could find to help them with their research. After all their research the students presented their information to the class. Before each group presented we created a new graphic organizer in our notebook and the students even helped come up with some of the ideas for how they wanted their information presented.
Once all the presentations were over and graphic organizers filled in, we finished off our "Who Were The First Americans" graphic organizer by filling in the AFTER section. It is the same categories as our prior knowledge, but now we should have more detailed descriptions :o)
On the left you'll see my example and the right is the student's final product.
You can really use any of these graphic organizers for any regions, tribes, or topics. The kids really enjoyed getting to become the teachers for the day and did a pretty good job I must say!
