Native Americans and their Biomes Part II

After creating a landscape depicting the biome where their Native Tribe lived, children were given a Native American myth or legend to read and study. Each child was challenged to retell the story to their peers using all the skills ably demonstrated by gifted storyteller, Vanessa Johnson. Some of skills the children identified when Vanessa shared some oral stories were: She showed enthusiasm, used voices of different people, used the audience to interest and involve the audience, used eye contact and spoke loudly. The children took this assignment seriously and enjoyed the retelling of some fascinating stories. Some of the books children studied were the Abenaki tale: How two feathers were changed from the loneliness and the Inuit tale "Kayakatuk" and Coyote Makes a Man - Native American Story from the Great Plains.

As children fine tuned their text describing the language, culture, beliefs and way of life of their tribe, we collected one more time to synthesize the information we had amassed over three months of study.