Learning about Native American Tribes

Today in class we split up into different groups and did a jigsaw about Native Americans.  This jigsaw that we did was different from the one that we had done last time.  During this jigsaw, we all worked on the same topic together.  In the previous jigsaw, we had separate topics that we became experts on and then split up into expert groups created a presentation and then went back to our "home" groups and taught them about our topic. During this jigsaw, we were already in our expert groups and we were all becoming experts on the same topic.

Learning about the different tribes of Native Americans is a very important part of Social Studies.  Each of the different groups got a different tribe that we had never heard of before.  The different tribes that we were going to be learning about were the Dine, Muscogee, Tlingit, and Lakota.  We had to research and become experts on our tribe.  My group got the Lakota tribe, this was a very interesting tribe to learn about.  We then created powerpoints and fun activities for when we taught the lesson to the class.  In our powerpoint, we included all different things about the Lakota tribe like their history, some of the traditions that they had, their culture and religion, and many more.  The main thing that we focused on was the geography of the Lakota.  Since we were learning about how to teach geography in the previous class it only seemed right that we did this activity in the next class.  In our presentation, we had to include the five different themes of geography.  We found that the Lakota live in a very hilly and grassy region, they are mainly located in the two Dakotas and the surrounding states.  Most of the other tribes were located in the surrounding states as well.  All of the tribes lived in similar homes, their homes were made out of mud and sticks.  Some common things throughout all of the tribes were song and dance.  Each of the tribes would have certain ceremonial songs and dances that they would do for events.

After we became experts on each of the different tribes we presented our presentations to the rest of the class.  Each of the different groups had a fun activity that had something to do with the tribe that they researched.  One of the groups did a tribe that was very into art.  In order to get the class involved they had them color a symbol that would be found in the tribes' art, we also colored with the most popular colors that were found in the tribes' art. Some of the other groups showed videos of the certain dances that the tribes would do.  For my group, we had a dance that the class was going to do.  The moves from the dance are similar to some of the moves that the Lakota tribe would do in some of their dances.