Tribes Of The Desert

A staggering 650 million people live in deserts across the world. These worksheets look at the lives of The San People and The Matmata People and how they have perfected ways to keep cool and find water where there seemingly isn’t any.

The San People live in the Kalahari Desert and some archaeologists believe they have done for over 80,000 years. Your students will learn about the life and expertise of the San People, their gender roles, diet, housing, and skills for finding and storing water as well as keeping warm during the freezing nights.

The Matmata People live in southern Tunisia and gathered world-wide fame when their town was used in the 1976 Star Wars film: A New Hope. The impacts of the increased tourism have had their positive and negative impacts on the town. These are discussed with your students considering whether the good outweighs the bad in term of social, economic, and environmental impacts, and if the town should continue to advertise its notoriety.

A range of individual and group activities are incorporated within these worksheets, including, gathering research from print, annotating their thoughts, and ideas and reading graphs.