Classroom Activities for Before and After Your Museum Visit The permanent exhibits cover an area of 85,000 square feet and include a vast amount of information. To make your Museum visit positive and enjoyable, here are some suggested classroom activities for different age groups. Using one or more of these activities will help to prepare your group for their Museum experience and help them to focus on specific questions as they tour the exhibits. An Activity for All Ages Corn, A Gift from the Land The Pequots consider corn an important gift from the land. Indigenous to the Americas, it was an essential food source because it could be preserved and used throughout the winter, especially when game was scarce. Today, corn is still an important food source. Have your class check food labels to see how many contain corn or a corn syrup base. Don’t forget the snack food! Activities for Younger Students Five Tools This is an activity to help students think about tools, asking themselves such questions as: A. What is a tool? B. How do tools help people do work? C. How do tools make work easier? D. What materials are used to make them? Have students name five tools their mothers and fathers use and five tools they may use. What materials are used to make these tools? Have students name five tools that they imagine Pequot people may have used a long time ago. What materials do they think people used to make their tools? During the Museum visit, have students find at least five tools displayed throughout the many exhibits. After their visit to the Museum, students may want to compare their pre-visit list with the new information they have obtained. How are the tools Pequots used a long time ago similar to the tools we use today? Things I Like To Do Make three columns with these headings: A. Things I like to do. B. Things I think Pequot children today like to do. C. Things I think Pequot children a long time ago might like to do. Have students list as many things as they can for each column. Explain that it is all right if their list for Column A is longer. After visiting the Museum, students can examine their lists again and should now be able to increase their lists for Columns B and C. Younger students might like to draw some of the activities for each of the columns. Activities for Older Students Ecology of Mashantucket This activity helps students to both appreciate how well the Pequots knew their land and to develop a greater respect and understanding of their own environment. To appreciate the Pequots’ knowledge of the land, it is helpful for students to find out about their own environment and its inhabitants. Have a class discussion defining the following words: A. Ecology B. Habitat C. Ecosystems D. Environment Students should have access to the Petersen Field Guide Series of plants and animals to use for this activity. Each student should keep a journal to record information. Each student should fully describe their study area; by observing, identifying and describing the animal and plant life. Students may draw or take photographs of plant or animal life they have selected to study. During the Museum visit, focus on the 16th century village and have students identify and describe the animal and plant life. Now compare their notes on the Pequot environment with their own study area. Compare how our society and Pequot society treat the environment. What has changed? What can we do about it? Discover Five Connecticut Nations This activity helps students become familiar with all of the Native reservations in the state, and be aware of and compare the contemporary land base of the Mashantucket Pequot with their original homeland. Have students make an outline map of Connecticut and include some of the major rivers in southeastern Connecticut (i.e. Mystic, Thames and Connecticut). Have them locate the six reservations in Connecticut today: Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Mohegan, and Golden Hill Paugussett (two reservations). Have students shade in Pequot territory prior to European contact. After their visit, students might want to find out more about the other five tribal nations