American Indians were often given names from nature, such as Running Deer, to suit their characters. What name would students choose for themselves, their friends or family?

KS2

Choose a stanza - either eight, nine, 10 or 11 - from Henry Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” and learn it by heart, noticing how the rhythm and repetition make the poem easy to remember. Do the Native American words help?

KS3

Ask groups of students to discuss the pros and cons of living in a pre-industrial tribal society.

KS4

Read Keats’s “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”. The poet compares his reading of a translated poem about travels in Ancient Greece to Spanish conquerors’ discovering the “New World” of South America. Have students ever discovered a “new world”? What brought them to the discovery? What did they find there?

Read Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun or watch the film and discuss the playwright’s treatment of the idea of “civilisation”, as presented through the two main characters.