Sun Dance in Silver Bow and other PowerPoint Lesson Plans

One of the hidden gems on our website are our PowerPoint-based lesson plans. These simple-to-use lessons provide you with the expertise of a guest speaker without the hassle and expense.

Each has a PowerPoint and script (along with information on the standards the presentation addresses.) 

Our newest offering in this genre is "Sun Dance in Silver Bow: Urban Indian Poverty in the Shadow of the Richest Hill on Earth". Dr. Nicholas Vrooman, author of "The Whole Country was ... 'One Robe'": The Little Shell Tribe's America, created the PowerPoint based on a presentation he gave to teachers attending our Richest Hills workshop in 2015. The high school/college level presentation complements the primary-source based lesson plan "Montana's Landless Indians and the Assimilation Era of Federal Indian Policy: A Case of Contradiction," created for us by Laura Ferguson. (Note, too, that the Little Shell's fight for federal recognition continues. See, for example, this recent article in the Great Falls Tribune.)

Another upper level PowerPoint is "Butte's Industrial Landscape," created by Professor Fred Quivik for the same audience of teachers but also adaptable to high school. 

Other PowerPoint Lesson Plans include: 

• "What They Left Behind": Archaeological Sites in Montana (grades 6-12)
• "The Art of Storytelling" grades K-6 and 7-12  
• "Yanktonai Dakota (Sioux) Winter Count" 
• "Children of the Mining Camps" (grades 6-12)
• Montana’s Charlie Russell" (available in two versions: one for elementary and one for upper grades)
• "Profiles of African American Montanans" (grades 6-12) 
• "A Beautiful Tradition: Ingenuity and Adaptation in a Century of Plateau Women's Art" fourth/fifth, middle school, and high school versions 
• "Railroads Transform Montana" (grades 6-8)