About This Lesson
In the Kindergarten Core Knowledge History and Geography unit Native Americans, students learn about early Native Americans through the eyes of three representative children from the past, who live in three different North American cultural regions.
Students first spend the day with Little Rabbit, a boy in the Eastern Woodlands. They see the longhouse he lives in and the wild game his family hunts, and they watch him catch a large trout as his mother collects a basket of water from the river. Students next travel to the American Southwest, where they meet Una, a girl of the Ancestral Pueblo, and her cousin Len and see them gather firewood, tell each other stories, plant and harvest corn, chase birds and small animals from the fields, hunt, and listen to Kokopelli’s flute in the wind. Then in the Pacific Northwest, students meet Hilki, a boy who goes fishing with his father and brothers in a canoe, looking for king salmon. Finally, students observe a potlatch, a celebration around a new totem pole that Hilki helps paint.
