Games of the Eastern Woodlands

Our students have so much fun learning through experience that I try my best to come up with ways to make history come to life.  One of the better activities was the one in which we recreated games of the eastern woodlands.  If I were to do the lesson again, I would have the students create their own props, but for the sake of time I provided all of the materials.

GAME 1: RING AND PIN

Ring and Pin is a popular game in many cultures.  Among Native American tribes different materials were used to create the game that involves throwing a ring in the air and spearing it by the attached pin.  Here are some facts you might want to share with your class which I took from this website: Beyond the Chalkboard

The Wampanoag used deer toe bones. 

The Iroquois use horn and call the game  “spearing moose.”

The Penobscot in Maine used a piece of leather for their ring.

The Mohave in Arizona used slices of squash.

The Paiute of Nevada used a rabbit skull.

The Narragansett in Rhode Island carved a piece of wood.

The Karok from Northern California used dried salmon vertebra.

The Digueno from Southern California used acorn caps.

The Klamath people in Washington used salmon bones.

These images came from the web link above.

In our version, I found paper bowls and cut the bottom out of them.  For fun, I decorated the edges with Eastern Woodland patterns of flowers and leaves and vines.  I attached the bowl to a piece of string, and the string to an unsharpened pencil.  These were simply the tools I had lying around the classroom, but I'm sure you could get more creative.  

A fun take home assignment would be to have children come up with their own way of recreating this game and bringing them in to share with the class.  To play, I partnered students up so that one person was tossing and one person was counting successful “hits”.  I timed, each side for a minute and we made it a little competition and added up points.

Success! 

GAME 2: HOOP AND STICK

Okay.  There may be a a fancier name for this game, but this is what we called it since these are the tools we used to recreate it.  In the past, many games were played in order to help children prepare the skills necessary for adulthood.  Boys engaged in activities that would help sharpen their hunting and fishing skills.  I found pictures online to help me show this to the kids.  

To create the hoop and stick game I took two hula-hoops and crisscrossed strings over the center (anchoring them still with rubber bands) to make holes.  I had wooden dowels lying around my room from some other project and these were perfect for “spears”.  

Supplies you'll need

To play the game, two kids stood a short distance apart and rolled the hoop back and forth to one another.  The other kids lined up and took turns trying to throw the dowel through the holes of the moving hoop.  If they got it through, they scored a point for their team! For fun, we had another student act as the catcher who ran back and forth retrieving the spears to keep the game moving. 

It really was this simple!
I love how serious the "catcher" in the background is!  

When the Native American played, each hole represented an animal.
If you made into a smaller hole you earned more points.
That was too advanced for us though =)

It was such a fun day!

Foods of the Eastern Woodlands

LESSON THREE

The best advice I received when I began teaching about the native people of the Eastern Woodlands, was to start by covering their basic needs.  Approaching the material this way, made it considerably more manageable. 

So after learning about traditional Eastern Woodland shelters and the resources used to build them, I moved on to discussing what foods were available.   Food is one of my favorite things to talk about, so this was fun from the start.  But the lesson ended even better than it began, with a taste of popcorn dipped in maple syrup!  

To begin, we learned about 'gathering' - what people would have gathered from the environment to eat and that this was often one of the responsibilities children would have. caption

Then we brainstormed names of animals that live in this environment that might have been hunted.  My favorite part of this lesson is when we talk about the American Indian belief that all things in nature have a spirit.  People would thank the animal for giving its life for their needs.

I use these illustrations to show how early American Indians used the materials in their environment to create tools for hunting.  While gruesome, the kids appreciated that the turkey snare and the "death fall" allowed people to hunt for food with minimal harm to themselves.  
These illustration come from a book called: The New England Indians (C. Keith Wilbur)

The Three Sisters were a major staple of the Native Americans.   Planting fields in this manner helped yield successful harvests. 

Many foods that the Native American people grew were foreign to the Europeans who arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

After talking about the foods people of the woodlands gathered, hunted and grew, the students completed a graphic organizer in the form of a plate - Page 6 in the All Woodland Worksheets packet -  They were tasked with illustrating and labeling foods eaten in each of the three categories.  The plates looked delicious and were a fun way to reinforce the information as well as assess each child's understanding.

We learned that the early Native Americans often ate in the morning and shared a large meal around mid-day.  If they were hungry in between larger meals, there were always pots stewing, dried meat to chew on, or popcorn to pop!

So as my students filled up their plates, I set up my popcorn machine and made a batch of air pop popcorn for the class to share. We were delighted to learn that the early Native American people would cook kernels over the fire, and that it was considered a snack that brought people together.  We put it in dixie cups and sprinkled maple syrup over it for a sweet flavor - similar to the way tribes in the northeast enjoyed it!

Shelters of the Eastern Woodlands

LESSON TWO 

While there may be others, I introduced my students to four different types of shelters that the early people of the Eastern Woodlands built to thrive in their environment.  Wigwams and Longhouses were sturdy shelters for the northeast, protecting people against the harsh winters and utilizing the birch and elm tree forests that grew in the region.  The Wattle & Daub shelters were prominent in the southeast where the warm sun would dry and harden the clay walls of the structure.  In the swampy regions of present-day Florida, the Chickee was constructed by the Seminole people who adapted to the marsh and heat. 

Example:

Ms. Ho: Which of these shelters is a wigwam?

Ede: I think the wigwam is the shelter in the northeast corner!

For this lesson I warmed up with a guessing game - asking kids to match each picture to a name.  Just to reinforce those geography skills a little more, I asked them to use the compass at the top when giving their answers.

To change up my approach, I partnered students up and had them read information about each shelter.  One pair read about the Wigwam and the Longhouses and then completed a venn diagram.  After 15 minutes they would switch with another group who had read about the Chickee and Wattle & Daub structures.  By the end of class, each group had collected concrete information on each of the four shelters.

Make copies of these Shelter Fact Sheets so that students can read the information in partner groups.  I back them onto construction paper and laminate them for future use.  I love visuals, so here are some images:

Create a venn diagram form, or use mine which is the third page of the All Woodlands Worksheets so that students can record the new information.

Tribes of the Eastern Woodlands

LESSON ONE

Because of where our school is located, we start our study of Native America in the Eastern Woodlands.  By beginning in this region we are also able to examine life before the influence of the European settlers. 

Though I face the continual challenge of finding creditable sources, I am grateful that my school does not ask that students work from a text book.  It has encouraged me to create my own visual guide through lessons and to pull and cross-reference information from many sources.  As I have mentioned earlier, I am a great proponent of PowerPoint as tool for the elementary classroom.  While there is other fabulous technology out there, I have found that PowerPoint and a simple projector sufficiently allow me to create an interactive teaching environment. 

For this first lesson, my goal is to establish a sense of where and when we are as we delve into the Eastern Woodlands.  To do so, we look at series of slides:

As we begin our study of the Eastern Woodlands, why do you think some maps might distinguish between the Northeast and the Southeast?  What do you know about these regions today that might impact how the Native American people lived here years ago?

When you picture the Eastern Woodlands, imagine an endless forest, long before buildings and highways and parking lots existed.  Have you ever hiked in a forest like this?  What kind of animals or resources might people have had access to?

We will be exploring the Eastern Woodlands in the 1400s, a hundred years before the first Europeans arrived.  There are a lot of names for the native people of the Americas.  “Indians” was a mistake Christopher Columbus made that stuck.  Most tribes called themselves “the people.” 

At this point, I pass out a blank map of the Eastern Woodlands region and ask students to read the information on the slide to record the location of each tribe.  This introduction, allows students to review and apply their U.S. state geography skills!  The Tribe Location Worksheet is the second form included in this packet - All Eastern Woodlands Worksheets - which I made and use for this unit.

This is a list of 8 of the many tribes of the Eastern Woodlands.  Using your geography knowledge,  identify the area where these tribes lived.
 (Many Native American people still live in these areas today!

When my students are finished, we go through the map together and check our work.

   

Teaching about the Native Americans: How to Start

In December, it was time to move on from geography and into the study of Native American culture and way of life at the start of our nation’s history.  I look forward to this unit every year with a mixture of delight and trepidation.  There are so many awesome opportunities for project-based learning, however, there seem to be an equal number of ways to perpetuate stereotypes.  I have tried hard to fill in the gaps of my own understanding of the earliest Americans, so that I can teach a more balanced view of the past.

I realized quickly in my first year that telling my students we would be studying the Native Americans gave them a false sense that we were studying a people who no longer existed.  So in my second year, I made to sure to begin our unit in the present.  We had just finished studying world geography, and so I asked children if they knew which countries their ancestors were originally from and why they came to the United States.  Even my 3^rd graders whose grandparents and great-grandparents were born here, were able to think about how these relatives lived years ago, and how things about them changed with the times.  Wouldn’t this be similar for the Native American people? 

It was a successful conversation that helped children to think about the place the earliest Americans have in our current history.  It helped them understand that we talk about their past, because it affects all of our pasts as US citizens, but it does not mean that the Native Americans have disappeared or that they live the same way they once did hundreds of years ago. 

From doing my research online and listening to the ideas of other teachers, I went from the present to the very past.  Through PowerPoint, I spoke to my students about the land bridge, how the earliest Americans were nomads who were believed to have followed the wooly mammoth from Asia to North America and how later people perhaps came by sea down the coasts.  Here are some of the slides I used.  Guess which one was their favorite.

We talked about how our world has changed over time, how the continents have moved and how this affected the earliest people.

We talked about how if we look at today's map from a different perspective we see how close Asia and North America truly are.  We have an easier time picturing "beringia" - the land bridge.

We talked about how this land bridge melted and reformed over and over again over time, until eventually it had disappeared.

We talked about how it is believed that the earliest Americans followed their food source - the wooly mammoth.

...But not like this.

And finally, we looked at a map of North America divided by regions in which the earliest Americans settled, and made a list of natural resources the people might have had available to them depending on their location.

So how do you wrap up a lesson that is mostly discussion?!  Sometimes we don't have time for children to fill out comprehension worksheets and sometimes those sheets seem repetitive.  Still, I want to know that my students have followed along.  My tool is the "Roll and Write."  At the end of class, (though sometimes the beginning as a warm up), I ask each table to roll the die once.  Whichever number they land on is the question they must answer.  You can differentiate this day to day! Sometimes I let them work as a group and write their answer on an index card.  Other times they have to answer it individually.  Either way, it is a great way for me to quickly assess what material has really sunk in!  I have a great reward system for those who have the correct answer but I'll save that for another time. 

This is what the "Roll and Write" slide looks like.  I save for the last 5 minutes of class,
or open with it to review a previous lesson.  

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This year I was also able to introduce the unit with a visit from the Redhawk Native American Arts Council’s performing artists.  If you are in the New York area this organization has a wonderful program for children of all ages.  The dance troupe visited our school and spoke about the stereotypes we often have about Native Americans, while getting our students out of their seats for some interactive dances.  Visit http://redhawkcouncil.org/ for more.