Donna spoke to Sharon:
DR> > Caitlyn wants to do a study on Indians next.  Where to
DR> > start in such a broad category?  How much to include and what to
DR> > exclude? (I've succes fully delayed it for 6 weeks or so by doing the 
pon
DR> > lake study.)
DR>You might want to define your study of "Indians" a little further, as that 
i
DR>a very broad subject that you could actually spend the
DR>whole year researching. You could stick with a family of
DR>tribes, or a regional area (for instance, Indians of the
DR>Southwest, Plains Indians, or a little broader by "Indians
DR>in the U.S." or "Canadian Indians" (I forget where you are
DR>located).
This is what we did last year for our unit study. We live in Canada and
so centered our unit study on Canadian natives. Our oldest researched
the Inuit (eskimos), the middle son studied the Iroquois, and my
youngest and I studied the Blackfoot Indians who live in Alberta with
us. We touched on has a group on the interesting Haida (spelling?)
Indians of the west coast.
  We made their shelters or tried. One book gave instructions for the
longhouse of the Iroquois and with a lot of help from Mom we put in
together and today it still stands with hanging corn, strips of fur etc.
in the longhouse. We failed miserably with making a teepee. We never
really found good instructions for that. They wrote reports and were
graded so many points for each sub area such as shelter, food, games
played, until 100 points or more could be scored for 100%. You may want
to do a unit study of "frontiermen" to follow you're native study.
  If you are interested in studying American natives you may want to
  take a look at the Konos Vol. 1 unit study curriculum. It has mega
ideas in it. It comes with recipes, map of where to find the individual
nations, ideas for study or activity and my favorite part of the Konos
is the book list of titles to research with. For indians it is nearly
2 pages long. We had to find all the above ourselves since we are
Canadian and it did take a lot more work so if you are doing American
natives you would enjoy this book. Theres also enough other topics to
keep you busy for 3 years or more.
                            Colleen
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 X SLMR 2.1a X Be still and know that I am God - Psalm 46:10
--- Maximus 2.02
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