Lone Dogs Winter Count, Lakota Dakota Lesson with Supplements, Grades 4-8

This is an exceptionally presented and well-written Lesson and Teacher Guide with all supplemental content for grades 4-8, teaching Lakota Winter Counts, from the Smithsonian Museum.

Lakota winter counts—pictographic calendars of a community’s history—provide a unique look into the history of the Lakota Sioux people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike historical accounts recorded by European settlers and explorers, winter counts represent a rich Lakota tradition of oral history and storytelling. Community historians, known as winter count keepers, maintained and used these pictographic records as mnemonic devices to remember the sequence of events that marked each year. By referring to the winter count, members of a Lakota community could mark events in their own lives. From the Teacher Guide:

This resource is dedicated to giving both Lakota and non-Lakota audiences access to the Smithsonian’s extensive collection of winter counts. Many teachers in the U.S. and Canada are already using winter counts as focal points for lesson plans in math, history and social studies. By creating this on-line database of winter count entries collected from ten winter counts and including supporting educational material, we hope that more educators will use these primary sources in the classroom.

This lesson and teacher guide on Lakota winter counts was created to facilitate the incorporation of Lakota winter counts into your primary and middle school curriculum. Again, all supporting materials are included here, providing relevant background information, visual material, topic suggestions, sample lesson plans, and resource lists. I hope this format works for both in-school and homeschool environments