Description
Discover the true story of the people who were already here!
Why did the Pilgrims step ashore and find a cleared, planted field with nobody in it? Who opens their own fish trap on purpose, every single night? And how did a language that children were punished for speaking end up winning battles in the Second World War? This five-lesson unit answers those questions with true stories from history, written to be read aloud and enjoyed.
Recommended for grades K-6.
Over five days, children travel through more than four hundred years of Native American history. They meet Samoset, who walked alone into a settlement of cold, hungry strangers and greeted them in their own language. They meet the Yurok leaders on the Klamath River who opened their fishing weir every night so the families upstream would eat too. They meet the Cherokee leaders who wrote to an American general to warn him exactly what the journey west would cost, and were right. And they meet Preston and Frank Toledo, two Navajo Marines working a field radio in a code no enemy ever broke, and John Herrington, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, floating outside the International Space Station.
Along the way children read the real words people wrote: the settlers’ own 1622 journal, a letter carried out of a Cherokee camp in June of 1838, and the United States government’s own account of its boarding schools. They learn to ask the two questions every historian asks. Who wrote this down, and whose story is missing?
Each lesson includes:
– A story-based reading with real historical images
– Lesson audio for independent listening
– Vocabulary words
– Questions to Think About
– Key Dates to Add to Your Timeline
The complete unit also includes:
– An illustrated timeline of the key events
– The full chronological list of timeline dates
– Discussion questions for the whole unit
– A “Be a Historian” activity built on real quotations from the lessons
– A final quiz with an answer key for parents
– A resource list of books, films, sites, and hands-on activities, with working links
– Coloring pages
– The sources behind every fact, and the image credits for every picture
Complete one lesson a day for a meaningful week of learning, and your children will finish knowing something most American schoolbooks never tell them: that the land was never empty, and that the nations who were here are still here, with their own governments, their own languages, and their own plans.
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