Naya Nuki: Little Girl's Book Club

We were able to host our neighborhood's Little Girl's Book Club again this month. The book was Naya Nuki, a historical fiction book about a Native American girl who was friends with Sacagawea. Both Naya Nuki and Sacagawea were captured by an enemy tribe. Naya Nuki escaped and traveled hundreds of miles by herself to return to her family and her tribe.

Because Michelle has so much reading homework for school, I do most of the reading aloud of teh books for her book club. Ella and Gabby also listened in to parts of the book and Gabby was fascinated by the bear. She asked "Why? Why?" (a million times) as I read and wanted to see the drawing of the bear over and over. Michelle also had lots of questions as we read the book.

We had a fun time with the girls. We started by discussing the book for a few minutes. Then we had a scavenger hunt. I had cut out buffalo and strawberries out of cardstock which I had hidden around the house. The girls had to search for "food" as Naya Nuki's tribe, the Shoshoni, had to and as Naya Nuki did while returning home. But searching was not without danger. I warned them before they began that some of the buffalo and strawberries (which were numbered) had dangers and some were bonuses. One of the buffalo represented the time Naya Nuki found a large pile of buffalo and used them to make new mocassins and this gave extra points. But one strawberry patch was by a bear and she had to climb a tree to escape. One buffalo had wolves nearby and another was near an enemy tribe. These caused the person to lose points.











After that, we had a snack of berries (strawberries and cranberries) and nuts (peanuts and almonds) and jerky (beef in our case).

Then I gave the girls some examples of Native American picture writing and had them write a story in pictures.

I think they had a fun time.