Coal City Community Unit School District 1 issued the following announcement on Dec. 3.
Students in Ms. Miller’s 5th-grade class have spent the month of November learning about the Native Americans in order to honor Native American Heritage Month.
The students started out the month learning and comparing the different regions that the Native American tribes were located in. They focused on the natural resources of the region, what kinds of houses the Native Americans lived in, and the special occasions celebrated that made the regions and tribes unique. The next week, students learned about specific tribes and the conflicts they encountered with the “white people”. Students also became Myth Busters and through research articles and much debate they proved or disproved several typical myths about Native Americans. For example, Native Americans prefer to be called Native Americans instead of “American Indians” and Native Americans feel honored by Indian mascots, along with several others. The final project was to learn how Native Americans share information throughout history with storytelling. The culminating activity was to make “buffalo skins” from brown paper bags and write the stories they created with pictures like the Native Americans in the Plains were known to do.
Original source can be found here.
Source: Coal City Community Unit School District 1
