Native American Lesson - Pictographs

Today I want to write about a lesson that has not failed me twice within a couple years - even with the same kids! Two years ago, when my daughters were 8 and 6, we did a unit study with another family, and this lesson was a hit. This year, we did a two-day study with our "Enrichment Group" (which is basically a co-op, but we don't limit ourselves to strictly "academic" subjects, so we thought co-op was a little too confining), and my girls found their notebooks and begged me to do the same lesson with this group. It required almost no prep time or effort, and the kids were mesmerized. I think the moms were mezmerized too at how their kids were listening and volunteering to share their stories.

So here is what we did. I started off talking about writing in general, why it is useful in everyday life, and how some spoken languages don't have written language to go with them. Using a wonderful website - http://www.inquiry.net/OUTDOOR/native/sign/stories.htm - I told the kids about pictographic writing, and how Native Americans used it. There are no ready printouts on the website, but I copied and pasted the stories into Word and added their respective pictures. I made enough copies to hand them out to each child. Then I read the stories out loud as the kids followed the pictures and tried to guess what each symbol stands for. Then I gave them a picture of a buffalo hide and asked them to make up their own pictographic story. This sounds so easy to do, and it was a lot of fun. We have twin girls in the group who hardly ever speak in front of others, and they VOLUNTEERED to tell their stories. We have a girl who just lost a horse, and she told us in her pictographs the emotional story of what she had gone through. It was a wonderful and rewarding day.