Native American Research

5 th Grade

Native American Research Project

Native American Clipart Native American Clipart supplied br First People-A large site about Native Americans and members of the First Nations.

Project : Over the next month, you will be researching what it was like for one Native American tribe to live and survive in a world very different from ours. Your guiding question is: How did these early Americans use their environments to survive?

Step 1: Choosing one region and one tribe from that region.

  1. Eastern Woodland Indians include: Iroquis, Wampanoag, Mohawk, Huron, Shawnee
  2. Great Plains Indians include: Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Blackfoot, Sioux
  3. Southwest Indians include: Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Anasazi
  4. Northwest Coastal Indians include: Tlingit, Chinook, Tillamook
  5. Southeastern Indians include: Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, Natchez

Step 2: Creating a Working Bibliography

You will create a " working bibliography ," which is a list of the resources that you will or are using to research your project. A working bibliography:

  1. helps you to know where to go if you need more information from one of the sources you used.
  2. makes it easier for you to do your final bibliography.

For your report, you will need to have 3 different sources of information:

  1. or Kidzworld
  2. An Internet resource (your choice-but it must be a reliable source.)
  3. A print resource (book or article)

Key Words:

  • Resources or sources : places where you find information. Sources can include printed texts, like books, magazines, and articles, internet sites, videos , and pictures/clipart.
  • Bibliography: A listing of your sources or where you found your information. A bibliography includes information like the title and author of the source, the publisher, the publication date, and the city in which it was published (if the source is a book), the name of the website and the organization that maintains the website, the date you went to the website and the website's URL. (Another name for a bibliography is "Works Cited."
  • Citing Sources : You give credit to authors for their words, ideas and/or pictures by telling YOUR reader where you got your information from (the source.) Now the reader of your report has a way to check the information and find out more about the topic.
  • Plagiarism : If you copy information from a source without citing it, this is called plagiarism. This is like stealing - it is illegal and unethical.


Step 3: Start researching, reading and taking notes on an organizer.