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"General Custer splendidly accepted," he wrote Wednesday. "From then on they were partners."

Beside him were his painting on brown paper, which mimicked symbols painted on a buffalo hide, and sheets of paper in which he had planned his story through a sequence of images and words.

Some Plains Indians recorded their history, based on the most important annual event, with pictographs painted on tanned animal hides. A keeper of the winter count knew the stories behind the symbols.

"They write their history on a buffalo skin," fifth-grader Zebadiah Bodine said by way of explanation to a visitor. "That's the short version."

Haygood gave students samples of the pictographs, such as two hands approaching each other to indicate peace, and asked them to create a multi-year story.

Planning sheets force them to organize their story and write lead sentences. Then she expects the children to flesh it out in a story of several pages.

"It would be a bad paper if it was one page," Jacob said. "It would be, like, 'then this happened, then this happened,' 11 times."

"Look for bumps in the road," Haygood told the students at the beginning of Wednesday's session. "You want it nice and smooth."

Haygood sat with one girl who seemed stumped. Haygood showed her that she already had the gist of a story in her pictographs.

"So you have your ideas. Now all you have to do is write them," she told the girl, who protested that it was hard.

"Can I help you do it?" Haygood asked and stayed with the girl.

The students also will make a shoebox diorama at home representing one tribe's way of life, with a poster to explain it. And they'll write a seven-paragraph research paper, using topics prompted by Haygood. There will be other activities next month.

"I learned that Native American history is way important," fifth-grader Amanda Nielsen said, "because if no one knew about it, no one would be able to study it and know how important they are."

Haygood uses the projects to teach reading, writing, the arts and social studies.

The research paper, for example, will help them learn how to take notes from a book, discern the main ideas, and put the information into their own words.

In the fifth-grade classrooms of Haygood and Cinda Stanek on Friday, students made sand paintings after learning how and why Navajos made them.

Stanek knelt behind a low wooden box on the floor as children sat, knelt and stood in a semi-circle facing her. Speaking softly and slowly, she showed them how to carefully apply their glue and take pinches of colored sand and dribble it over the glue.

But she also reminded them of the original meaning of sand paintings. Students knew that medicine men or women made them to heal sick people.

"Who is the hataalii in a tribe?" Stanek asked.

"It's kind of like a medicine man or shaman," Jacob said.

"The hataaliis are kind of a mix between what we would call a doctor and a religious person, perhaps a minister," Stanek said.

"They would sit the (ill) person inside the sand. When the person was in there, they would chant and stuff," fifth-grader David Roa said. "... For every sickness there was a symbol."

Fifth-grader Asia Goodwin said her design displayed the four directions.

"I've learned a lot," she said of the Native studies unit. "I thought the hogans (Navajo dwellings) were like half a circle or a sphere. They also have a doorway. It's very interesting because I'm learning a lot of new things."

• Eric Fry can be reached at eric.fry@juneauempire.com.