Time Travel to Indian Tribes
Fourth Grade, Patricia Lim
In fourth grade, one of our projects is to create a book about traveling back in time to live with a California Indian tribe in the pre-Columbian era. The children learn research skills, history, and narrative writing skills. This year, we also were able to collaborate with a high school freshman class doing a similar project, so our children got to see how older students approached creating a book, and they got a real audience for their own books.
We start the project by doing a “gallery walk” through our classroom library of books on California Indian tribes. The children browse and choose three tribes on which they want to focus their research. Then I use those preferences to assign the tribes. At least two students are studying each tribe so that we can do partnering activities later on in the project. To start our research, we brainstorm as a class “what would need to know” if we were to travel back in time to live with a tribe. I take this list of questions and put it into categories which becomes part of a research packet that they use to help guide their research. In order to begin searching for information, the students learn about how to use informational books by using the index, table of content, headings, etc. They then read about their tribes and take notes about each category of information.
Each tribe has two students, so some of their work is done with partners. In one activity, for example, they get together with another pair from a different tribe. They compare what they’ve learned and fill out a Venn diagram and analyze similarities and differences between the two tribes.
Finally, they begin to work on their narrative. It’s a picture book about time travel.
And so that then gets intertwined with the writing curriculum. Part of our 4th grade writing standards are to master writing a narrative. We use all of the strategies and everything we learned in Writers’ Workshop for this narrative. They write a brainstorming story map, a rough draft, and we revised revise, revise.
For this story they had to do two specific revisions. One was just to improve on the “craft” of writing, so the story has an interesting lead, descriptive sentences, and uses rich vocabulary. On another revision, they needed to focus on the content. They had to be sure they had at least two pieces of information from each of the research categories we had come up with. That is a difficult task, to include all that information and still write a good story.
As they are revising, they also need to think about their audience. This particular year, they had a complex audience, which was made up of three different groups -- the first was the class, the second was the 9th grade class coming to see the project and then their 1st grade buddies. So it was a huge range.
The last step is to edit their work, and finally to illustrate it, which they did beautifully.
