My Native Americans Notebook

Welcome back to check out my Texas History INB for Native Americans in Texas. For earlier editions on setting up your notebook, maps, and regions of Texas click on the title.

A blog post full of notebook pictures, recommended read alouds, ideas, and tips for teaching the unit.

Our unit on Native Americans is one of my very favorites because of the museum that we use as our final assessment. If you would like to know more about the museum you can check it out in this post.

Back to the INB.

I like to start out by discussing the different types of shelter that Native Americans live in, because let's be real, most of our students think that students live in teepees exclusively which just isn't the case. This gives me a good chance to check out what other misconceptions my students may have, and try to start unraveling them from the beginning.

After that, we use this PowerPoint to get an overview of Native American groups that are or were found in Texas. We go over all of them, but really focus on five. Each year I allow my class to vote on which five they would like to focus on, so it can be different.

Once our five tribes have been chosen we dig a little deeper as a class to find out more about them and record our information on this fold-up.

Then begins the knitty-gritty. Students then rank the the groups they would like to study from one to five and are assigned a tribe to study by moi. (One year I let them choose with little interference from me, and I will never do that again.)

Once they have their group that's when they research their little hearts out. I usually give them a full social studies block to research without recording anything, then give them this fold-up to record their information. In order to help with finding suitable research sites we use these QR codes along with books from the school and local library and anything else we can get our hands on. Because it is so hard to find kid level research that doesn't dumb down the facts I usually print and keep anything that we find of value.

We also discuss a few important Native American leaders with this fold-up as well as compare Native American governments, and sort differences in Native American life before and after the European explorers came to Texas.

At the end of the unit we assess through our Native American Museum in which the whole school, our community, and district leaders attend. Everyone loves it!

Of course, students finish up their research and projects at all different times, so I also have these task cards and activities handy to keep everyone engaged!