Today in class we learned about Native American writing symbols that were utilized to tell stories over generations. We listened to a reading of a book about a young Native American boy who was different from all of the other boys in his tribe; he wasn't a warrior, he was a painter instead. He went out into the wilderness to think about becoming a man and had a vision. He also took in the sunset. He wanted to replicate the sunset on hide, but he couldn't find the colors he wanted. Eventually he found a way to make the colors he wanted out of flowers that supposedly grew from paintbrushes. The teachers explained we would be painting our sunset with watercolors, then using Native American symbols on our "cowhide" to tell a story. We learned various watercolor techniques on a smaller piece of paper before getting to work on painting our sunset, which would frame our "cowhide". While we waited for our sunset to dry, we set to work on trying to tell our story through symbols we learned about from our translation sheets. My story tells about two people, myself and another person, setting up a blanket at night to watch the sky, stars, and moon. It also mentions how we build a campfire and talked during the night.
I think a good extension activity to do with this project would be to have students make a storybook of the cowhide pages, with the sunset as the outside cover. This way students could utilize a wider variety of symbols on each page, to practice telling a story chronologically rather than all at once. Students could present their storybook to the class upon its completion; students would have more of an opportunity to tell a detailed story, as well as really learn and explain what each symbol means on each page.
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