Virtual winter count: Teacher's notes

Battiste Good (1821-ca. 1907)
[Winter Count, 1230-1907]
Library of Congress

Your students will learn that a winter count was a way that several North American Plains Indians tribes recorded their history. In this part of the project, your students will create their own version of a winter count, using graphics and stories to record and communicate a picture of what life is like for a typical student their age.

Each month, your class will decide on the most important event of the month to record. They will choose or create a graphic to represent that event, and decide how best to tell the story that lies behind the graphic. Maybe September is the month they started to learn keyboarding. Perhaps November is the month everyone in the school had to get meningitis shots. In April, there might have been a freak snowstorm that closed the school for three days. And perhaps May was graduation.

Working with the topic:

1. Have students explore the winter count pages on this site. The links are located on the student task sheet.
2. As you begin to talk about winter counts, you can raise some of the fundamental issues that lie at the heart of Counting Canadians. Here are some questions you might ask:
   1. Why do people want to collect and record information about their lives?
   2. Do you think all people would answer the question "What is life like for us?" in the same way?
   3. What kinds of history can you record in pictures only? (Note: A winter count is only one kind of pictograph. You might want to show students some examples of cave drawings, rock carvings and ledger books. An online search will yield good results for you here.)
   4. How could you use numbers to help you answer the question "What is life like for us?"
   5. Who gets to have input into possible answers to the question? Have there been times in our history when some people's voices and experiences were ignored? Would adults answer this question differently from children?
   6. How do we decide which events, ideas or data to include in a final picture of what life is like for us? Do we focus on the most common experiences? The most spectacular ones?
   7. What kinds of data are collected at Statistics Canada? Where do these data come from?
   8. How do we make sure that other people who look at what we record really understand what we mean?