Social Studies Homework
Due Tuesday, Oct. 11th
Write 1 paragraph. The title of your paper is “What Veterans Day Means To Me”. A paragraph is at least 5 sentences.
*Veterans Day gives Americans the opportunity to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of all U.S. veterans. November 11 is Veterans Day. A veteran is a soldier who has served his/her country.
Project for Social Studies- Due Monday, Oct. 17th.
Make a diorama. This is a 3-D model of any type of Native American house that you choose. The base of the project is a shoe box or a piece of cardboard (no larger than 10 inches square). Label your house and include a description. Use any type of materials that you choose (dirt, sand, leave, bark, wood, sticks, clay, play dough). You can choose any tribes’ housing that you want. You do not have to choose one of the houses on this paper. It is just to help if you don’t have internet.
Wigwams are Native American houses used by Algonquian Indians in the woodland regions. Wigwam is the word for "house". Sometimes they are also known as birchbark houses. Wigwams are small houses, usually 8-10 feet tall. Wigwams are made of wooden frames which are covered with woven mats and sheets of birchbark. The frame can be shaped like a dome, like a cone, or like a rectangle with an arched roof. Once the birchbark is in place, ropes or strips of wood are wrapped around the wigwam to hold the bark in place.
Wigwams are good houses for people who stay in the same place for months at a time. Most Algonquian Indians lived together in settled villages during the farming season, but during the winter, each family group would move to their own hunting camp. Wigwams are not portable, but they are small and easy to build. Woodland Indian families could build new wigwams every year when they set up their winter camps.
Tepees are tent-like American Indian houses used by Plains tribes. A tepee is made of a cone-shaped wooden frame with a covering of buffalo hide. Like modern tents, tepees are carefully designed to set up and break down quickly. Originally, tepees were about 12 feet high, but once the Plains Indian tribes acquired horses, they began building them twice as high.
Tepees are good houses for people who are always on the move. Plains Indians migrated frequently to follow the movements of the buffalo herds. An entire Plains Indian village could have their tepees packed up and ready to move within an hour. There were fewer trees on the Great Plains than in the Woodlands, so it was important for Plains tribes to carry their long poles with them whenever they traveled instead of trying to find new ones each time they moved.
Grass houses are American Indian homes used in the Southern Plains by tribes such as the Caddos. They resemble large wigwams but are made with different materials. Grass houses are made with a wooden frame bent into a beehive shape and thatched with long prairie grass. These were large buildings, sometimes more than 40 feet tall.
Grass houses are good homes for people in a warm climate. In the northern plains, winters are too cold to make homes out of prairie grass. But in the southern plains of Texas, houses like these were comfortable for the people who used them.
Chickees are good homes for people living in a hot, swampy climate. The long posts keep the house from sinking into marshy earth, and raising the floor of the hut off the ground keeps swamp animals like snakes out of the house. Walls or permanent house coverings are not necessary in a tropical climate where it never gets cold.
Adobe houses (also known as pueblos) are Native American house complexes used by the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest. Adobe pueblos are modular, multi-story houses made of adobe (clay and straw baked into hard bricks) or of large stones cemented together with adobe. Each adobe unit is home to one family, like a modern apartment. The whole structure, which can contain dozens of units, is often home to an entire extended clan.
Adobe houses are good homes to build in a warm, dry climate where adobe can be easily mixed and dried. These are homes for farming people who have no need to move their village to a new location. In fact, some Pueblo people have been living in the same adobe house complex, such as Sky City, for dozens of generations.
Earthen house is a general term referring to several types of Native American homes including Navajo hogans, Sioux earth lodges, subarctic sod houses, and Native American pit houses of the West Coast and Plateau. Earthen houses made by different tribes had different designs, but all were semi-subterranean dwellings -- basement-like living spaces dug from the earth, with a domed mound built over the top (usually a wooden frame covered with earth or reeds.)
Earthern houses are good for people who want permanent homes and live in an area that is not forested. (It's difficult work to excavate underground homes in areas with many tree roots!) Living partially underground has several benefits, especially in harsh climates-- the earth offers natural protection from wind and strong weather.
Igloos (or Iglu) are snow houses used by the Inuit (Eskimos) of northern Canada. Not all Inuit people used igloos -- some built sod houses instead, using whale bones instead of wooden poles for a frame. Like a sod house, the igloo is dome-shaped and slightly excavated, but it is built from the snow, with large blocks of ice set in a spiral pattern and packed with snow to form the dome.
Igloos are good houses for the polar region, where the earth is frozen, the snow cover is deep, and there are few trees. Snow is a good insulator, and dense blocks of ice offer good protection against the arctic winds.
Brush shelters are temporary Native American dwellings used by many tribes. Brush shelters are typically very small, like a camping tent. People cannot usually stand up straight inside brush lodges -- they are only used for sleeping in. A brush shelter is made of a simple wooden frame covered with brush (branches, leaves, and grass.) The frame can be cone-shaped, with one side left open as a door, or tent-shaped, with both ends left open.
Most Native Americans only made a brush shelter when they were out camping in the wilderness. But some migratory tribes who lived in warm dry climates, such as the Apache tribes, built brush shelters as homes on a regular basis. They can be assembled quickly from materials that are easy to find in the environment, so people who build villages of brush shelters can move around freely without having to drag teepee poles.
The Chickasaw people lived in settled villages of houses and small farms. Chickasaw houses were made of plaster and river cane walls with thatched roofs. Most towns also had a ball field with benches for spectators. Chickasaw villages were surrounded by wall made of tree trunks to guard against attack.
