Fourth Grade Units: One Ready to Go and One Ready to Test

Every year I hear from fourth grade teachers looking for a curriculum to teach Montana history. In the past, I've suggested road maps but I know that isn't enough, so we've slowly been working on a fourth grade Montana history curriculum.

Montana Today: A Geographical Study is the first unit in this curriculum. It was tested and improved by Libby teacher Bill Moe and is ready to implement! Designed for grades 4-6, it asks students to investigate how climate, geology, and geography affect the lives of Montanans. 

• In Part 1, they construct population maps and look for patterns. 
• In Part 2 they will about Montana’s three regions. 
• In Part 3 they learn about Montana’s reservations and tribal nations. 
• In Part 4, they plan a route across the state, learning about the places they choose to stop as they go while improving map-reading skills (an abbreviated take on our very popular Mapping Montana A-Z lesson plan). 
• In Part 5 they will tie what they learned together to answer the unit’s guiding questions. Total time is about 10-15 days.

We spent the summer creating the next unit, Unit 2, Montana's First Peoples. This 10-15 day unit combines math, science, reading, and social studies to explore what life was like in this region before the arrival of Euro-Americans: 12,000 years ago until about 1810. We need teachers to test this unit. 

• Part 1 asks students create a timeline starting 12,500 years ago in order to see that Euro-Americans have only been in this region a relatively brief period of time. They also read to find out what life was like before Europeans arrived on the continent.
• In Part 2 students make atlatls, according to the Making an Atlatl lesson plan master teacher Jim Schulz wrote up last year.
• Part 3 uses a map activity to introduce the tribes who lived in Montana around 1800.
• Part 4 offers students the opportunity to take a virtual tour of our exhibit Neither Empty Nor Unknown: Montana at the Time of Lewis and Clark to learn more about the lifeways of indigenous Montanans (particularly the Crow and the Blackfeet).
• Part 5 takes the lesson plan "Winter Count: Marking Time" from a larger unit we published some years back called "The Art of Storytelling: Plains Indian Perspectives." 

As you can tell from the descriptions, we've integrated lessons we'd already created into Unit 2 (as well as creating some new ones) but we still want to test it from start to finish. Email me if you are interested!