Your Earthwork!
Can you tell us how to build it? Storytelling can be a powerful tool that helps people understand or pass knowledge on.
In the EXPLORE area you can learn ore about oral traditions. Before radio, television, and newspapers, people had to rely on telling other people HOW to do something and it was the listeners’ responsibility to REMEMBER. Often KNOWLEDGE was shared through a STORY…so that important ideas would be easier to REMEMBER.
How would you tell your friend how to build your earthwork design? Lets try passing along instructions using spoken, or oral, instructions!
If you have not done the SHAPES and SYMBOLS Challenge yet, check it out!
There you can design an Earthwork symbol reflecting special meaning to you. Here’s how it works! With a friend, share your Earthwork symbol idea. Together, talk about the symbols you both have chosen. Talk with each other about WHY the symbols you each have imagined and chosen are personally important. Then, make your plans. Take as much time as you want describing and mapping out HOW you will to build your mounds. Then, go outside and build! (Or use paper if you can’t get outside.) Work with your friend and transform your ideas. SUPPORT, HELP and GUIDE each other as you both CREATE your Earthworks!
When you both are done, look at each other’s creations. How did you do? Where did you get it right? What design choices and steps in your design process were difficult to communicate? As you do this, think about HOW CHALLENGING or HARD it must have been to BUILD a giant Earthworks like the Serpent Mound or the Octagon Mound?
What steps do you think would have been challenging for the Earthworks Builders to communicate?
If you and your friend were to try to design and build another mound, what would you do differently to communicate better?
