5th Graders Recreate Native Villages
By Janice Bartosic
January 08, 2008
Fifth Graders Recreate Native Villages
What would life be like in an Indian village centuries ago? What would your surroundings look like? What kind of home would you live in? Fifth grade students in Mrs.Bartosic’s social studies class at Burton Campus answered those questions recently when they created model Native American villages. Student groups were assigned the task of creating a model village to represent one of four Native American cultural regions: Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, and Northwest Coast. The students worked in teams for about a week to research, design, and assemble their villages. They were required to represent the environment, food, shelter, clothing, and art and technology of their assigned culture. For example, the group creating a Hopi (Southwest) village used clay to create an adobe home and pottery, and sandpaper to simulate a desert environment. The Lakota Sioux (Plains) village included horses, a teepee and buffalo.
“Our projects were fun to build and gave us an idea of what their culture was like,” said fifth grader Joshua Motil.
Classmate Sabrina Flaherty said that making the villages “helped us see how different the cultures were,” and Alexis Johnson said, “It was cool to see how their environment determined their culture.”
Crossing over into the language arts, Anna Carlson said, “The Northwest Coast village I worked on inspired me to write a story about a girl who might have lived there.”
Stop by soon and view their creations!
Picture caption: Fifth grade students from Mrs. Bartosic's class show off their Northwest Coast village.
