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UNIT 4

Seasonal Ceremonies Calendar

Tribal nations across Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota organize time differently than a Western calendar does. Build a seasonal website that shows how.

⏱️ 7 Stages
🌿 Early Intermediate
🎯 45-60 min per stage
📐 CSS Grid + Interactivity

The Big Idea

Every Tribal nation has its own relationship to the seasons - specific foods, ceremonies, gatherings, and practices tied to the turning of the year. That knowledge belongs to the community. This unit gives you the tools to make it visible on a webpage, designed the way you want it to look.

CSS Grid is this unit's big concept. It lets you build layouts with rows and columns, placing content exactly where you want it. You'll use it to create four season cards arranged in a grid, each with its own color, content, and hover effect that reveals more when you move your mouse over it.

You'll research the seasonal traditions of the Tribal nations in your region - Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Dakota, or Lakota. Your research becomes the content. The code becomes the container.

By the end of this unit, you'll be able to say "I can..."

  • Build a grid layout using CSS Grid
  • Create cards that reveal more content when you hover over them
  • Organize content into rows and columns
  • Research seasonal Tribal traditions and present them on a webpage
  • Use CSS transitions to add smooth animation to your design

What You'll Build

A seasonal ceremonies calendar representing four seasons of life for Tribal nations in your region.

Four cards. Four seasons. Each one styled with its own color and filled with the traditions, foods, and ceremonies you research.

Hover over a card and it opens up. The grid holds everything in place.

Three websites and counting. You're building real momentum.

Your learning path

The 7 Stages

STAGE 1 The Grid Foundation CSS Grid container setup STAGE 2 Four Seasons Grid columns + rows STAGE 3 Seasonal Cards Card color + content STAGE 4 Hover Effects Highlight on hover STAGE 5 CSS Transitions Smooth timing + easing STAGE 6 Your Calendar Fill in your ceremonies STAGE 7 Sacred vs. Shareable Digital citizenship
Let's Begin

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Sources

All cultural, historical, and traditional content in this unit is grounded in reputable sources. We prioritize official Tribal nation websites, state and federal government resources, and Native-authored publications. If you are an educator or student who wants to explore further, each source below is a trustworthy starting point.

Official & Tribal Nation Sources

Academic & Educational Sources

Cultural Protocols: Sacred vs. Shareable Knowledge

Educational Standards

This unit aligns with national computer science and technology standards as well as state-level social studies and integrated CS standards. Select your state below to see the relevant standards for your classroom.

  • OSEU.SS.C.1, Seasonal Lifeways as Living Cultural Practice (All Grades): Students will understand the cultural practices, traditions, and values of Tribal nations, including the significance of seasonal cycles in organizing community, ceremony, and knowledge. (The calendar students build represents the four seasons not as calendar dates but as culturally grounded periods of distinct activity, relationship, and responsibility for Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and Dakota/Lakota peoples. Students research the specific seasonal knowledge of nations in their region using official Tribal sources and Native-authored educational material before deciding what to represent.)
  • OSEU.SS.H.1, Sacred and Shareable Knowledge (All Grades): Students will understand that Indigenous knowledge systems include both knowledge intended for broad sharing and knowledge that is sacred, ceremonially restricted, and not appropriate for public representation. (Stage 7 is built entirely around this principle. Before publishing their calendar, students evaluate each seasonal entry against the question: does this belong on a public webpage? The unit provides a framework for that evaluation grounded in the First Peoples Principles of Learning and the National Park Service's guidance on cultural knowledge transfer. Students make and document a deliberate design decision about what their calendar will and will not include.)
  • CSTA 2-AP-12 (Grades 6-8): Design and iteratively develop programs that combine control structures, including nested loops and compound conditionals. (Students use CSS :hover and transition properties as conditional display behaviors, building and refining interactive seasonal cards across multiple stages.)
  • ISTE 1.4, Innovative Designer: Use a variety of technologies within a design process to identify and solve problems by creating new, useful, or imaginative solutions. (Students design and build an interactive calendar using CSS Grid, applying a deliberate design process with live preview feedback at every step.)
  • ISTE 1.6, Creative Communicator: Communicate clearly and express themselves creatively for a variety of purposes using the platforms, tools, styles, formats, and digital media appropriate to their goals. (Students choose how to represent seasonal cultural knowledge visually and publish their calendar as a web page for a real audience.)
  • MN Social Studies 6.4.18.1 (Grade 6): Describe how Dakota and Anishinaabe people today narrate their own history, including seasonal lifeways in the pre-contact period. (The seasonal calendar is built around the traditional seasonal activities of Ojibwe and Dakota peoples, centering their own narratives of the four seasons.)
  • MN ELA 6.3.3.2 / 7.3.3.2 / 8.3.3.2 (Grades 6, 7, 8): Create and share a multimedia or digital communication, choosing tools to meet the task, purpose, and audience, demonstrating understanding of digital footprint. (Students publish a complete, interactive web page as their deliverable for this unit, making intentional choices about what cultural content to include and how to present it publicly.)
  • MN Media Arts 2.8.2.3.1 (Grade 8): Create media artworks using transdisciplinary or transmedia production to express emotion and meaning, including simple web page design considering positioning with multimodal perception. (This is the only MN K-12 standard that explicitly names web page design as a learning example, making it a direct and precise match for this unit.)
  • MN Media Arts 2.6.5.10.1 / 2.7.5.10.1 / 2.8.5.10.1 (Grades 6, 7, 8): Demonstrate an understanding that artistic works influence and are influenced by personal, societal, cultural, and historical contexts, including the contributions of Minnesota American Indian Tribes and communities. (Students research and represent the seasonal knowledge of MN Tribal nations in a digital medium, directly connecting web design to Indigenous cultural contributions.)
  • MN CS Crosswalk 8P.2.2.1.2 (Grade 8): Create a computer program to illustrate the transfer of energy within a system where energy changes form, with emphasis on sequences, events, and conditionals. (The :hover pseudo-class and CSS transitions are event-driven and conditional display behaviors, meeting the programming concepts named in this benchmark.)
  • ND CS 5.DD.2 / 6.DD.2 / 7.DD.2 / 8.DD.2 (Grades 5-8): Create an algorithm to solve a problem using multiple coding patterns, including loops, conditionals, functions, or variables. (CSS :hover and transition properties follow algorithmic logic: define a condition, define a response. Students build and test these patterns stage by stage in the live code editor.)
  • ND CS 6.DD.3 / 7.DD.3 / 8.DD.3 (Grades 6-8): Test algorithms or processes to determine if the predicted outcome matches the actual results. (The live preview panel in every stage lets students test their CSS grid and hover rules immediately, building the habit of predicting outcomes before running code.)
  • ND CS 6.S.1 / 7.S.1 / 8.S.1 (Grades 6-8): Examine the positive and negative impacts of technology on how people live, work, and interact, including considerations of equitable access. (Students consider how publishing Indigenous seasonal knowledge on the web can both preserve and expose cultural information, directly engaging the sacred vs. shareable knowledge discussion in Stage 7.)
  • ND CS 6.E.2 / 7.E.2 / 8.E.2 (Grades 6-8): Evaluate information sources to identify bias and determine reliability. (Students research seasonal knowledge of Dakota/Lakota/Ojibwe peoples and are guided to prioritize official Tribal nation sources, peer-reviewed educational material, and Indigenous-authored texts over general web sources.)
  • ND Indigenous Language Standard 2.1 (All Grades): Learners investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship of practices to the customs, traditions, and perspectives of the cultures studied. (The seasonal calendar is built around the ceremonial practices of Dakota, Lakota, and Ojibwe/Anishinaabe peoples in North Dakota, treating those practices as living expressions of cultural perspective rather than historical artifacts.)
  • ND Indigenous Language Standard 2.2 (All Grades): Learners investigate, explain, and reflect on the relationship of products to the customs, traditions, and perspectives of the cultures studied. (The completed seasonal calendar is a digital cultural product. Students analyze and represent the cultural products of Indigenous peoples, seasonal activities, traditional foods, ceremonial occasions, and reflect on what those products reveal about worldview.)
  • ND Indigenous Language Standard 5.3 (All Grades): Learners value and promote Indigenous, heritage, and native languages and show interest in efforts to preserve and revitalize those that are endangered through active engagement in language and cultural activities. (Using web technology to represent and share Indigenous seasonal knowledge is a direct act of cultural engagement. This standard was designed with ND Tribal nations in mind and is cited here with that Indigenous community context.)

Note: This unit also aligns with the North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings (2015), which directly addresses Dakota, Lakota, and Ojibwe/Anishinaabe cultural knowledge and seasonal ways of knowing. That alignment will be added in a future update.

  • SD CS 6-8.AP.03 (Grades 6-8): Design and iteratively develop programs that combine control structures, including nested loops and compound conditionals. (CSS :hover and transition properties are event-driven control structures. Students design, test, and refine their interactive seasonal cards using this same logic.)
  • SD CS 3-5.AP.03 (Grades 3-5): Create programs that include sequences, events, loops, and conditionals. (For grade 5 students, this standard covers the foundational concept of events in computing, directly met by the :hover and transition behaviors students build in this unit.)
  • SD CS 6-8.IC.01 (Grades 6-8): Compare tradeoffs associated with computing technologies that affect people's everyday activities and career options in South Dakota and the world, as well as urban, rural, and reservation communities. (This standard explicitly names reservation communities. Publishing a seasonal ceremonies calendar that represents Oceti Sakowin knowledge on the web sits directly at the intersection of computing technology and the cultural life of SD Tribal communities.)