Native American Unit Study & Lapbooks

Our study of Native Americans was, of course, not comprehensive, but it was pretty broad. We went to one of our local libraries and just picked up a book on every tribe that we could find. Then we figured out that there was one particular series that we liked best, so we got the rest in that series on interlibrary loan. This the series called A First Americans Book by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a book about Indians from our area of the world, so we purchased If You Lived With Indians of the Northwest Coast. That was a great little book. We enjoyed so much learning about Northwest Indians and enjoyed looking at photos on the internet of totem poles too.

As usual, the kids made lapbooks about the things they learned. This is the first time that my little preschooler has made a lapbook to go along with what the others were studying. He’s growing up so fast. So here’s his first. His favorite elements were the eagle that had wings that he could flap and the dot-to-dot dream catcher.

(These lapbooks are all in slideshows. If you mouse over them in the bottom quarter, you will see the thumbnails and click on the first one to start them over, if you weren’t able to see the whole set.)

JD Boy designed and drew the stuff on his cover. There is a totem pole for the Northwest Indians and a tipi for the Plains Indians. He also made a lot of the elements inside his lapbook completely by himself: the tipi, the shield and he changed around how the birch bark canoe was supposed to work. He narrated to me what he wanted written about each group of Indians inside the appropriate mini books. Other elements were either taken from pictures from the internet, Dover coloring books and the book History Pockets, Native Americans.

Zippy has become quite a writer. She loves to write. She did lots of writing in this lapbook. She designed most of her mini books, using pictures that she found on the internet and then wrote on the inside about the different Indian tribes and traditions. For her cover she cut out the back cover of one of our Dover coloring books.

I hope my kids learned a lot from this unit. I was surprised at how much I learned about the North American Indians. I was often saddened by how they were treated in some of the stories that we read. We had plenty of opportunity to discuss the difference between Christians and real Christians while reading how the Native Americans were treated.