Montana's First Peoples

After a year of hard work, we've finally posted the second unit of our fourth grade curriculum!

Montana's First Peoples is organized around the following Essential Understandings:

• There is great diversity among Montana's tribal Nations. (EU 1)
• There is great diversity among individual American Indians. (EU 2)
• Native peoples have lived in Montana for thousands of years. Their history predates the “discovery” of North America. Native traditional beliefs persist today. (EU 3)
• Even before Europeans arrived in the area we now know as Montana, Montana Indian Nations were feeling the impacts of colonization. (EU 5)

The unit is cross curricular (incorporating ELA, Art, and Math) and its lessons give students the opportunity to practice standards-based skills, including creating and using a timeline, reading informational text, writing to clarify thought, speaking and listening, and analyzing maps.

The unit can be used independently, but it is designed to follow Unit 1: Montana Today: A Geographical Study.

Special thanks to Mike Jetty in the Indian Education Division of the Office of Public Instruction, who offered valuable comments and alerted me to several resources we ultimately included in the unit, and to Pray teacher Shannon Baukol, who tested the unit and whose suggestions made it substantially better!


I hope you'll check the unit out--and once you do--let me know what you think (positive or negative--I'm still taking feedback.)