Message from aharris

[Anonymous]

I'd love some feedback....

I designed my curriculum unit (an assignment for the East Asian Seminar) for grade six history, and I decided to focus on The Silk Road. I wish I had more hours in the day! Maybe I would have checked this thread and found some of the ideas and websites listed here faster than I did! And, if I had more hours in a day, I would have also tried to incorporate more video clips, art, and other media into my lessons. Two examples that I have already found are "The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan", a CD with a collection of traditional music from the countries along the Silk Road; and clips from the movie "Warriors of Heaven and Earth", which has fantastic shots of desert, rocky terrain, mountains, and forest, and is supposed to take place on the Silk Road during the Tang dynasty in China. Alas, I can only do some much with the time alloted by the moving of the planet, so I had to stop somewhere and hand in a "completed" unit....but as with most lessons and ideas in the classroom, this plan will forever be evolving, and I will forever be in search of things to add!

So, with that being said, I will post the brief introduction PowerPoint I created to spark interest in my sixth graders, and I will post the 5-day mini unit and project on my next reply. This Intro PowerPoint is supposed to be very basic and leave questions unanswered, because the next step of the mini unit is a research project that will require the students to do research for more details about it. (See below and my next reply for more details!)

If anyone is interested in the other materials and handouts and I don't end up posting them here on my own, please reply to this thread and I will post them.

Quick overview of the project: Students will work in small groups to research detailed answers to one question about the Silk Road (What it was, Where it was, What was traded, What the impact was, etc.). The small group will write, then record themselves reading, a mini-report about their topic. They will select images to show more about their topics and put their recorded mini-reports on the slides. The end result will be a class PowerPoint presentation about the Silk Road (putting all the group slides together) that has audio (the recorded mini-reports) and visual (the selected images).