📖Standards
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.5.9
Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.
⏰ Time Required
40 minutes
📲Technology Required
Students must have laptops, desktop computers, or tablets with an internet connection. Make time to transition from doing a slides presentation to having students log into Making Camp Premium.
📃 Summary
This social studies lesson for Grades 3-5 explores the history and application of plants as both medicine and food in the every day lives of indigenous people of North America.
This 40-minute lesson begins with a 20-minute presentation on how indigenous people used plants for medicine and a plant-based diet to insure their health. It ends with 20 minutes of gameplay in Making Camp Premium to help reinforce how plants were used by the Ojibwe, indigenous people living on the Great Plains. Here’s an overview of the bite-sized minigame you can use to reinforce this slideshow lesson.
- Making Camp Premium’s wild rice game features a two-minute long passage that is read aloud. and then playing a mini survival game. Players collect wild rice in a canoe. They must avoid a hungry, pursuant bear and hazardous logs.
📚 Lesson
Introduce the Lesson
In the Medicine Ways Google Slides presentation, students learn a brief history of Native American herb gathering and how indigenous people are pursuing health and wellness with plants. This presentation uses an example of a diet called the Waianae Diet, which is an indigenous diet used in Native Hawaiian cultural diet revitalization.
Personal Dictionary
The Vocabulary List is available with five vocabulary words from the presentation. Students have the extra option to add these words to a personal dictionary. Here are directions for making a Personal Dictionary, and here is a finished example for you.
2. Students will play Making Camp Premium for 15-20 minutes.
Games
Play Making Camp Premium.
In Making Camp Premium, click the icon called LIFE, and then find the icon that has a brown wild rice plant. Students will listen to the audio being read with highlighted paragraphs. They won’t be able to skip ahead or skip the passage.
Assessment
- This lesson has a section of formative assessment in the form of manipulatives for classifying junk food and healthy food.
- Students have the option to make a Personal Dictionary.
- The wild rice minigame is a gamified learning segment about history and culture.
Related Lesson
See the social studies lesson, Cattails, for Grades 3-5 for an in-depth look at this all-around useful herb that boosts survival in the harsh wilderness, and is still being used today, with new applications as biofuel and pollution clean-up.