Lesson 4 - Legends

Lesson 4 - Legends
Folk tales of the Cherokee

Click to hear The Cherokee Legend of the Hummingbird. The legend will be told in Cherokee with an English translation after every statement.

1. Focus and Review

Review the different legends with which the students are familiar.

2. Objectives

2.10 Identify strategies used by a speaker or writer to inform, entertain, or influence an audience.

1. The students will retell a Cherokee Language and create a picture book using Publisher.
2. The students will present the books in a book share with a kindergarten class.
3. The students will listen to a legend told in Cherokee and list the elements that made the retelling a
        success and kept their interest.
4. Students will read a Cherokee legend and list the elements that made the story interesting and
        entertaining.
5. The students will, as a class, rewrite a legend in picture book format and prepare a retelling for a
        kindergarten class, keeping in mind the elements that make the stories entertaining.

3. Teacher Input

Read Ganseti and the Legend of the Little People aloud to the class.
Guest speaker to tell tales of little people.
Distribute copies of Kathi Littlejohn's tale of the little people from Living Stories of the Cherokee.
To use for a model of retelling and illustration for younger students:

Hamilton, Anna Blanche. Illustrated by Cherokee Elementary Students. Rabbit Goes Duck Hunting Cherokee Indian Legend. Department of interior Bureau of Indian Affairs Branch of Education. No Pub date.

4. Guided Practice

The students will video tape the tales.
The class will discuss the techniques used by the story teller to keep their attention and to make the story interesting.

5. Independent Practice

Have the students read the tale legend Rabbit Goes Duck Hunting and then summarize it by drawing an illustrated version of the tale.
After the video taping, the students will use the word processor to write the stories and bind them and their summarized tales into books to read to their kindergarten reading partners.

6. Closure

The students will read their summaries and show their pictures to the class. We will then share our books and stories with the kindergarten reading partners.

Heather Payne /Cherokee Elementary School /AAM Unit Plan