Enrichment: Lewis & Clark, Sacagawea, and the On-A-Slant Mandan Indian Village

So remember when I wrote that the point of this trip was to provide enriched learning experiences for the girls?  Well, when you're driving long miles, it's hard to make that enrichment happen, but once we left Fargo and entered the west, we've made it a priority.  Yesterday the girls did a lesson on Lewis and Clark (with some help from a really cool iPad app).  They also listened to a book about Sacagawea (and were rightfully outraged at parts of her story: kidnapped at age 10 or 11, traded like goods to a french trapper, etc).  The site where Lewis and Clark met Sacagawea (and built their winter lodging, Fort Mandan) was 80 miles off of our route (on a ten hour day of driving), so we opted to visit another site that was home to the Mandan Indians (Sacagawea and Charbonneau were living with Mandan and Hidatsa Indians when Lewis & Clark met them).  We visited the On-A-Slant Mandan Village at Fort Abraham Lincoln, just southwest of Bismarck, ND.  It's part of the Lewis and Clark National Trail, and the explorers visited the site on their return trip to St Louis.



Maconites, don't these remind you a little of structures at the Ocmulgee Indian Mounds?

Inside one of the structures were benches inscribed with Native American pictographs, and the girls were so inspired by them that when we got back on the road, they created their own pictographs and wrote a story using them.  They also wrote narratives from the perspective of a young Indian girl, which included details like infection by small pox (the disease which lead to the abandonment of the On-A-Slant village).  The great part about this kind of enrichment is that it requires very little instruction and a whole lot of imagination.

For pictures of the other sites we saw on our drive yesterday, including Theodore Roosevelt National Park, click over to our photos on Flickr.

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Note: We have a seven hour drive to Glacier today, and once there I highly doubt that we'll have a good internet connection, so don't expect a post until we head to Washington State on September 10.