Resources to Start Off Your Week 43: First Nations Resources Cont.

Last week I posted about five awesome First Nations resources that can be used in our classrooms and I am so excited about the traffic it received! To keep this topic going, I thought that this week I could share an actual project that I completed with my Grade 11 World Issues. As you know, our unit consisted of four sub-topics:
– Ethno-diversity
– World View
– Effects of Assimilation
– Indigenous Rights

For our World View topic we looked at a variety of themes including religion, emotions, values, ethics, and relationship with the environment. Since there is only 9 students in my class, I wanted us to work on a collaborative project to help make my students more accountable for their work (they work WAY harder when they know the rest of the class is relying on their input)! What I came up with was actually a modification of a lesson plan I learned about when I was at the MTS Fab 5 Conference a month ago which covered the Seven Traditional Teachings (also referred to as the Seven Grandfathers).

After researching and discussing each of the teachings we worked collectively to make our own visual representation of the teachings.

seven traditional teachings, seven gifts, seven grandfathers, seven teachings classroom resources

Here is our finished product which is proudly displayed on the wall right in the entrance of our school!

Seven students each took responsibility for one of the seven teachings and the remaining two students each created a portion of the middle circle which represented the teachings in general. (I found this was a good way to differentiate the instruction because students had the option of picking a specific teaching and going more in detail or picking the center portion and being able to work with the general topic).

Here is a close up of each section:

The center portion, each half was created by a different student.

Respect

Courage

Truth

Honesty

Humility

Wisdom

Love

They turned out so awesome didn’t they!? I am so proud 🙂 In addition to creating an actual poster, students were asked to write 250 words on what their specific teaching meant to them or what the Seven Teachings meant to them (if they were working on the center portion).

If you would like a copy of the physical assignment and rubric I used let me know, I’d be happy to email them out to you!

If you would to learn more about the original classroom that inspired this project (the classroom of the presenter at the Fab 5 Conference), follow them on Twitter!