Say Hello to The Dine Tribe!

In Social Studies Methods, I learned and practiced the Jigsaw method of teaching. The jigsaw method is a very interactive activity that involves a lot of cooperative learning. It is great for all grade levels, especially grades three through six. Within the jigsaw method you are split up into groups and each person in that group decides on a specific topic. These first groups you would call home groups. Each person in your home group would have a different topic. The students would then separate into smaller groups. Those smaller groups, called expert groups, would do the assignment on the topic he or she had chosen. When you have completed the assignment the students would go back to their home groups and teach the topic to their home groups. The people in the home group would then each present what they have worked on in the second group to their home groups members.

For the jigsaw method we focused on the topic of Native American. Although I am a history major, the topic of Native Americans is one I am least knowledgable about. This activity helped me gain more confidence in the topic. There were four different tribes that the home groups split into. They were the Mohawk/Iroqious, the Dine', the Lakota, the Muskogee, and the Tlingit tribe. For my expert group, I chose to focus on the Dine' tribe and their ways of life. I learned a lot about the Dine' Tribe and how they live by the research I conducted.

      This lesson was to help us learn about geography and how to teach geography to students. My group and I then looked at the impact the geography surrounding the tribe had their way of life. From learning about the impact it had on specfic group’s life you can see how geography impacts the lives of many people throughout history. For the Dine’ tribe it impacted what food they ate, what they clothes they wore, and how they lived. 

   For my expert group we created a glogster on the Native American tribe. Here is the link to our Glogster!