Category: History: Native American Indians Unit

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Toltec Indian Mounds, Arkansas

For the past two and a half weeks, I was on the road with the kids (we left hubby home working for much of the time). In yesterday’s post I talked about traveling with the kids in a general way.  We did SO much on this trip! We visited 18 family members who are strewn throughout the midwest. I did some research before we left and fit in some educational side...

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Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: Wood Animalitos – Oaxacan (Mexican) Folk Art

We continued to read The Corn Grows Ripe (about a Mayan boy and his family) this week and talked about life Mexico. We read about these imaginative creatures called Alebrijes at this art lesson plan website. In Mexico these are carved from one piece. Since we had lots of woodscraps (I bought lots of wood craft kits of cars, bird houses etc. for 50cents back in December), this seemed like...

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Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: Rugs

We looked at the brilliant colors of Mayan rugs visiting these sites: here, here, and at the Mayan Culture websites. We talked about the patterns they saw. Then the kids spent a lot of time while listening to our novel coloring their own Mayan rugs.  They worked really quite hard over several days: They used oil pastels for this project.    

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Ancient Mayan Indian Unit: God’s Eye — Yarn Craft

The Huichol Indians of Mexico and Aymara Indians of Bolivia make “eye of God” yarn crafts. Originally they were placed on alters, but now they are often sold in markets. I thought this was a perfect craft for the kids to go along with our talks about the ancient Mayan Indians. I used to make these in Girl Scouts, but came across this website which has details on how to...

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Ancient Mayan Civilization

In our slow, but steady move through history we have talked about nomads, ancient Egypt, ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome and then up into the Middle Ages. From here we’re going to turn to the Americas. Our next history unit study will be on Native Americans. I hope to incorporate some good literature books into our studies over the next few months (let me know if you have good...

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Books I’d Recommend for the Study of Jamestown Colony

**FREE COLONY RELATED CARDS: I just noticed at http://www.currclick.com/ that their current free product is on the American colonies.  There are lots of picture cards related to colonial life — pictures such as chamber pot, cotton, embroidery, flax, hearth, hornbook, indigo, tallow,  and more that would be great discussion points for the elementary crowd. One set of pages has a detailed description of the word, another group of pages includes...

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Jamestown Settlement — What We Learned This Week

We have learned a lot about the history of Jamestown settlement this week: Three hundred years ago,the English wanted to create a settlement in the Americas.  They knew about all the gold and silver that the Spanish had been bringing back from the New World and were determined to gather some of these riches themselves. They financed a trip with three ships to sail to the New World, to Virginia....