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  • I really enjoyed doing the magazine reflection. Even though I read magazines all the time (a guilty vice), I have never analyzed them in that way. The magazines were stunningly biased in terms of gender, race, economics. The values were very misplaced. It made me think about reading less of these types of periodicals in the future. Even casual reading of this type of literature probably damages a person's psyche in the long run!
  • Comparing works of art and clothing from different regions is a great way to illustrate the significance of the different environments on the lifestyles of the indigenous people.  I love the activity of the students describing the photos and coming to their own conclusions or best guesses about the regions of each group.  After listening to the music samples of the different regions, I would also play a few songs by Pamyua to allow the students to hear the evolution of at least one group of  indigenous musicians from Alaska and Greenland.  This is also a good time for the students to bring music from their own countries.

  • I enjoyed the exercise of reading the different magazines.  It was eye opening to see how materialistic our culture can be.  Also, how biased we are with just using white, beautiful people with nice teeth for models, and how unrealistic it is as a cross cut example of our society, mostly for the sake of advertisement. 

  • I enjoyed the first activity where we moved to the music and when the music stopped we joined up with a group to join in conversation.  This seems like a good activity to do with my middle school students.  Since the school I teach at is K - 8, the students have already formed friendship groups before the school year begins.  So it would be great for them to learn more about the other students that they are less familiar with.  The trick will be getting them to move to the music. 

  • I'm trying to think of appropriate magazines to use with fifth and sixth grade students for the primary source activity. Perhaps I could use a video game magazine??

    I've used the music, get-in-groups activity before. I'm thinking it would be good to do the first day and then do the Tlingit Welcome Song/Dance. Typically, we don't start with the Pre-Columbian era, but it might be a good bridge from third/fourth grade to do the welcome song. I will share the Pre-Columbian unit with our third/fourth grade teachers.

  • I really liked the picture evaluation.  I could see myself using this in my classroom and talking about the differences between them.  It also provides a platform for students for exploring the differences between observations and then drawing conclusions based on the pictures.  I could also see myself using a variety of pictures from each culture to help the students draw conclusions based on their observations.     

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