New York Native American Tribes, Who knew?

There are so many things I learned about Native Americans today in class. Many of tribes had similar features such as the houses many lived in were longhouses. My tribe was the Mohawks. I knew a lot about this tribe because I feel it is a very popular tribe to study. There were some things I did not know such as that the women in the tribe did a lot of the voting for the council representatives.  I did not know much about the other Native Americans before this project because it was not something that I studied recently.  Something I thought was interesting about doing this project was that the tribes all came from distinct areas in New York and mostly stayed in their own territories. I found the areas that the Native Americans more interesting as a college student because I am more aware of the different regions in New York State.  Another thing that I learned was that many of the famous people of the tribes had influence during the American Revolution.

             I thought this project became a little unorganized because many people forgot what tribe they were supposed to research. After we figured out who was researching which tribe, the groups worked out pretty well.  My group broke up the assignments for researching purposes. It helped us save time to find all of the information we needed. We also talked about different things we were finding as we researching. My group worked very well together during this project and we were able to complete the assignment very quickly and in an organized way.

                Although this assignment was developed for College students, it could be adapted for a fourth grade classroom. One thing that I would do differently is to have the students focus on less topics. The topics I would have the students focus on would be history, clothing, food and location. This would make it easier for the students to gather all of the information. I would have students hopefully in groups of four so that each student had a task to complete. Instead of making a PowerPoint, I would ask the students to fill out a web that they could bring back and show to their base groups. I think this activity would work very well with a fourth grade class and I would love to give it a try.  

As a teacher, after each student presents to their base group, one thing I would do is collect one of the graphs on each tribe and make copies for the whole class so they could have it to use a reference in the future.