Since a key objective of studying another culture is to gain an appreciation for it, and in doing so, become less of an other culture ourselves, the unit begins with a warmup exercise involving boundaries, which is listed below in lesson plan format.
Boundaries Lesson
OBJECTIVE: To introduce students to each other by exploring similarities and differences. To gain an awareness of how turf barriers can be assembled and dissembled.
METHOD: Students are given a worksheet (see Boundaries Worksheet, which appears before the bibliography of this unit) attached to a clipboard, and pencil, if necessary. They are asked to CIRCLE answers for A, B, C, and D. These questions describe the four main categories that they will be working with. Students will be organized and reorganized into four (standing) groupings based on the following:
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A) Which season were you born in? Winter, Spring, Summer, or Fall?
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B) Where were you born? North, South, East, or West?
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C) Which color do you like best? Purple, Green, Orange, or Brown?
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D) (Two groups) What gender are you? Male or Female?
With each grouping, students will be given two minutes to come up with three reasons why their group is better than the other three (or other one in the case of gender groupings). They will record this information on the worksheets.
DISCUSSION: Common Ground -- Students will discuss differences and similarities of opinions with regard to the groupings they wound up in, e.g., I agreed with Kisha that Spring was better because it wasnt too cold or too hot, but I disagreed with her about the choice for color; I like purple, she likes orange. Students will further discuss more serious divisions that groups of people set up, i.e., economic, racial, religious, stereotypical.
WRITING: Each student will fill in the last part of the worksheet noting three reasons why he or she feels that people sometimes find it difficult to find a common ground. They will also comment on why studying other cultures is an important part of being a good citizen.
EVALUATION: Shared reading of student writing will be discussed and commented on.
The First Americans
Time is like the day: for the young it is the
dawn, for the old man it is dusk.
(Mexico As Seen by Her Children, p. 15)
The quotes that appear below section headings (such as the one above) have been taken from Mexico As Seen by Her Children (edited by Luis Guillermo Piazza in association with Sara Sloan de Ayala and art editor, Teresa Piazza; 1978). These quotes are some of the many pieces of writing that will be shared with students throughout the unit. Because the book represents art work and writings selected from thousands of Mexican school children, ages three to 16, it serves as a living history of Mexico in which children are the storytellers.
WHOS ON FIRST?
Students will share in an oral reading (accompanied by discussion) of a somewhat humorized Eurocentric overview of the discovery of America in a mini play entitled: Whos on First? The play features young Tremaine, a fifth grader, who is having considerable difficulty in completing (or even starting) a research project on the discovery of America. The Library Media Specialist sets him up at a computer. Overwhelmed and dazed by the assignment, he drifts off. But work is being done inside the computer as historical characters involved in history-making sort out the details, not without considerable controversy and discord:
FATHER JOSE: The first people to come to America were nomads from Siberia, I tell you!
FIRST SAILOR: Atlantis! They were from the lost continent of Atlantis!
SECOND SAILOR: Lost continent, yes. Atlantis, no. They were from Lemuria. Oh yes, Asians from the lost continent of Lemuria -- in the Pacific.
THIRD SAILOR: No they werent. They were descendants of ancient peoples of the Middle East!
FOURTH SAILOR: Phoenicians! A great sailing people -- thats who they really were.
CLEOPATRA: Youre all wrong. They were Egyptians, the great pyramid builders.
MOSES: No, no, no! Ancient Hebrews from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel!
COLUMBUS: And I suppose I had NOTHING to do with discovering America, huh? I suppose thats why they have a parade every year to celebrate the discovery of America by -- who? Who could it be? Lets see. Is it the Nomads from Siberia parade? The Lost Continent People of Atlantis or Lemuria take-your-pick parade? How about the Ancient Peoples of the Middle East parade? Or the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Ancient Hebrews from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel Day parade? Any of those sound familiar? What? No? Ever hear of the COLUMBUS DAY PARADE!!!
FATHER JOSE: (Ignoring Columbus) Ill say it again: Nomads from Siberia.
ERICSON: Wrong, wrong, wrong. I made the first discovery in the year 1000, almost 500 years before he did (pointing to Columbus. Takes off his helmet and scratches his head) Ah, what a voyage. (To Columbus, angrily) They should have called it the LEIF ERICSON DAY PARADE!!!
COLUMBUS: Vikings, you all think youre so tough. (Smirking) Ridiculous hat.
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(Excerpt from Whos on First, Yel Hannon Brayton)
At the end of the play, Tremaine winds up in the computer with these characters (as well as others) to figure out how America was discovered. In the course of the play, he learns that roughly 31,000 years after the first people settled on the North American continent -- having migrated across Beringia (nowadays, the Bering Strait) about 30,000 years ago -- America would be discovered by Leif Ericson, a Viking, in the year 1000, and newly discovered, once again, in 1492 by Cristobal Coln (otherwise known as Christopher Columbus). Subsequently this vast land mass would get its name from French geographer, Martin Waldseemller, who mistakenly named the continent after Italian sailor, Amerigo Vespucci, which Waldseemller published in an atlas thinking Amerigo to be the explorer who discovered the new world. (In 1505, several letters describing such a discovery by Vespucci had been printed in Europe; The Cosmographiae Introductio by Martin Waldseemller; Exploring American History, p. 55.) Misnomer notwithstanding, eventually the disenfranchised as well as the profiteers of Europe would come to call this new world home as their countries disputed land rights and suffered religious conflicts. In the process, hundreds of nations of long-standing civilized peoples would be displaced if not nearly destroyed either by disease or by the imperialistic efforts of these newcomers. They would be lumped together and christened Indians owing to Columbus faux pas in thinking he had discovered a fast track to the West Indies. Over the next several hundred years to present day, that name would stick, only slightly modified by the equally inadequate misnomer, Native Americans.
By 1497, Cabot would lay claim to North America for England and in 1519 and Cortes would conquer Mexico for Spain. (Perhaps it is some small credit to the early conquistadors that they at least realized they were conquering the land and not discovering what had existed for aeons hitherto.) Additionally, Coronado would march across the American Southeast (1540); Raleigh would settle Roanoke Island (1585); Champlain would explore Canada (1603); Jamestown, a British colony would be founded (1607); the Pilgrims, fleeing from religious persecution, would land at Plymouth Rock (1620); and Dutchman, Peter Minuit, would purchase Manhattan Island from the Man-a-hat-ta Indians for twenty-four dollars worth of goods (1624). At about this time, Dutch and English trading ships would begin transporting Africans to North America, some first as indentured servants, but most as slaves. Mexico, having been conquered and colonized by Spain, would win its independence a couple of hundred years later in 1821.
Having read and discussed Whos on First? (the play above), students will engage in an exercise designed to give them some awareness of the immensity of time involved concerning the first discovery of the Americas. What does a span of 30,0000 years feel like?
Counting the Minutes Lesson Plan
OBJECTIVE: To give students a tangible idea of the enormous amount of time that 30,000 years represents.
TEACHERS SCRIPT (and Method)
As we have discussed, the first Americans probably arrived here about 30,000 years ago. Now, I want everyone to look at the second hand on the clock. When the second hand reaches 12, we will begin counting the seconds. (Students count to 60 out loud. If this gets tedious, so much the better. We want students to gain a visceral awareness of time passing.)
Lets say that the one minute we just counted equals one year. How long would it take us to count 30,000 years? (30,000 minutes.) What does that look like in hours or even days -- if we counted each minute, one right after the other, without stopping, day and night?
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(Demonstrated on the chalk board)
30,000 minutes / 60 minutes per hour = 500 hours
500 hours / 24 hours per day = 21 days (20.83)21 days / 7 days per week = 3 weeks (2.98)
Three weeks doesnt seem like that long a time, but remember, youd be counting day and night. In real time, it would take you over 300 life times, thats if you lived to be 100 years old each time.
Using The Native Americans, An Illustrated History, along with two National Geographic articles: The Peopling of the Earth (October, 1988) and Search for the First Americans (September, 1979), students will receive a pictorial overview of the first migration to the Americas. Paleo-Indians will be discussed as the first people to inhabit America. One can only speculate how and why these early people came to this land, but many archeologists believe that by approximately 30,000 B.C., a nomadic people crossed a land-bridge that had extended from Siberia to North America where the Bering Strait now exists. In the late 1500s, Jos de Acosta, a Jesuit missionary, suggested that Indians came from Siberia: . . . in 1589, Acosta wrote that small groups of hunters, driven from their Asiatic homeland by starvation or warfare, might have followed now-extinct beasts across Asia into America millennia before the Spaniards arrived in the Caribbean. (The Native Americans, p. 30)
Students will be told that there have been many ideas in the past about how the Paleo-Indians came to the Americas, as was depicted in the play. In 1552, a Spanish writer claimed that the Paleo-Indians were escapees from the lost continent of Atlantis. Others have believed that Paleo-Indians were Asians from the lost continent of Lemuria in the Pacific or descendants of ancient peoples of the Middle East. Paleo Indians have also been thought to be Phoenicians, a great sailing people; Egyptians, the builders of great pyramids; ancient Hebrews from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
However, geologists support Acostas theory and claim that because glaciers during the last Ice Age (Pleistocene) absorbed a great deal of water, dry land was exposed, which created a land-bridge. They also believe that these first Americans were fully developed humans since there is no evidence of earlier hominid fossil remains to be found in the Americas.
The First Mexicans
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We wander over the land, you and I. How
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many surprises, what strange plants, what
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odd shapes. Is that the way we are? Like the
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Mexican plants? They like us; we like them.
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The sap and the blood palpitating, playing,
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growing, traveling, living.
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(Mexico As Seen by Her Children, p.17)
In this next section students will gain a flavor of early Mexican civilization. They will journey through the ancient city of Teotihuacan, visit with the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, and learn to play a ball game with Hunter and Jaguar Deer, the twin brothers of the Popol Vuh, the Maya creation myth. In addressing some aspects of Mexican and Central American mythology, two books will come into play here for student reading: Mexico As Seen by Her Children and Warriors, Gods & Spirits from Central and South American Mythology. Additionally, students will be given pictorial presentations from Mexican and Central American Mythology, which includes hundreds of photographs of architecture and art works that such mythological stories have inspired. Included in this section will be student story writing and telling.
