#2852. Cattle Drive

Social Studies, level: Elementary
Posted Wed Apr 30 19:16:20 PDT 2003 by Cory Gilreath ().
Materials Required: Westward Ho! An Activity Guide to the Wild West by Laurie Carlson Grade: 4
Concepts Taught: The lesson explores community culture and teaches students about the challenges that cowboys face.

Objectives:
Students will know the physical and human characteristics of places.

Students will know how physical processes shape Earth's surface and how human actions modify the physical environment.

Students apply complex thinking skills when reading, writing, speaking, listening, and viewing

Activities: Instructional Strategies

Put students in groups of four
Give each group a cattle drive game including 20 fate cards, 300 pinto beans and a paper bowl * This game comes out of a book called Westward HO! An Activity Guide to the Wild West by Laurie Carlson
Each child takes 50 beans. Put the leftover beans in a bowl in the center of the group. The beans represent each player's herd of cattle. Each player draws a card and either loses or adds beans after following the directions on the card. When all of the cards are gone, the students count their beans to determine the winner. The cowboy with the most cattle at the end of the game is the winner.
After playing the game the group needs to go through the deck of fate cards and fill out their t-chart classifying the challenges as either physical or human.
Have team members clean up and return to their seats. Individually each student needs to write a diary entry. Using first person pronouns and writing from the perspective of the cowboy, students should tell about the cattle drive they just completed. They need to tell about the climate of the areas they drove their cattle through, the physical and human geographic features they encountered and finally they need to write their opinion of what being on a cattle drive was like. Students must give reasons for their opinions.

Assessments: How are the physical features and the human geographic features of a place alike and different? How did the plains environment influence the cowboy's work? How did the plains environment influence the life style of the Cheyenne Indian tribes? How do the physical and human geographic features of your neighborhood influence your daily journey to and from school?

Students will make a t-chart classifying the challenges of six places that they encounter on the simulation cattle drive as either physical or human. Students will write a journal entry about the cattle drive. In the journal entry, they will describe how climate affected them in three different locations that the cattle drive passed through. In this journal entry, students should give their opinions of what cattle drives were like. Students must support this opinion with information from the simulation game.