Suggested Activities for incorporating the Role Model Program into the curriculum
Each topic can be modified to accommodate the levels of your class, and resources may be available at the First Nations Education Centre to supplement lessons.
Arts Education
- history and significance of traditional art forms, for example: headdresses, button blankets, totem poles, bentwood boxes, beading, carving, tumpline weaving, cedar weaving, totem poles, canoes, drums, and masks. Activities could include age-appropriate related crafts for students to make.
- traditional First Nations design elements and themes, and the materials and tools used to create them
- traditional protocols regarding ownership of images, songs and music
- traditional local First Nations songs and dances
- writing and performing plays based on traditional stories
English Language Arts
- stories from the oral tradition
- how First Nations passed knowledge from generation to generation through the oral tradition, and how respectful listening was an important skill
Health and Career Education
- traditional First Nations rites of adulthood
- the significance and importance of the medicine wheel
- the family and elders as importance roles within aboriginal communities
- food traditions and harvesting methods
Mathematics
- Activities using counting and pattern recognition include beading and button blanket crafts
- First Nations methods of counting for different items (for example, fish, animals, objects and people)
- Carving and erecting totem poles
- Building
Sciences
- traditional uses of plants and traditional First Nations medicines. Activities could include nature walks to identify plants used by First Nations peoples
- how First Nations people predicted the weather and explained natural phenomena like the stars
- how First Nations people hunted animals and traditional uses of animals
- traditional seasonal activities performed by First Nations groups
- traditional First Nations foods, including fish (salmon, oolichan, etc), animals and berries. Activities could include sampling traditional foods.
Social Studies
- profiles of local First Nations groups, including their history, territories and culture
- how local First Nations groups governed themselves in the past, including clan systems and societal structures (chiefs, matrilineal societies, inheritance, protocols, genealogy). Activities could include making genealogy charts tracing students’ lineage by speaking to family members
- feast systems and protocols. Activities could include hosting a feast
- traditional First Nations tools, including those used in fishing and hunting, housing and transportation
- traditional First Nations uses of cedar
- First Nations environmental stewardship
- impact of the residential school system on First Nations people
- First Nations trade goods
- First Nations land claims and current system of governance
- how First Nations culture and technologies changed following European contact
