We were studying Native American cultures. We were talking about the Coastal Indians andtheir totem poles with pictures on them.

Then we thought about our culture, what was important in our lives and what we could draw on our own poles to show it. We called our poles culture poles. We drew and painted them on paper.

The Indians did not write poems. They told stories with pictures. But we also wrote poems to show our culture, but the Indians would not have done that.

For our poesm we each chose a word that was most important for our clture pole. We wrote that word up to down on our paper. Then we used those letters to begin each line of our poem.

Click on the poles to see a big picture in a new window.