Along the Silk Road

My name is Zachary Palmer, and for my review, I read the Along the Silk Road curriculum unit from the Silk Road Project. I am a high school social studies teacher at Oakland Catholic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I teach early world history to freshman, and AP United States History to juniors. I found the Along the Silk Road curriculum unit to be incredibly useful and comprehensive, and I plan on purchasing one for my own classroom use.
The most valuable element of this curriculum unit is its comprehensive, multi-subject nature. Page 9 of the unit contains a chart titled “Planning Around Multiple Intelligences.” You can use this chart to see what learning styles are accommodated by lesson. While most of the lessons feature verbal-linguistic and interpersonal intelligences, there are lessons that cater towards other styles such as mathematical style learning and intrapersonal learning. There is a cool handout titled “How Long Would It Take You To Walk The Silk Road?” This lesson reads like a word problem, but it also contains different variables that allow you to customize the experience. The curriculum unit also provides details about the different geographic areas along the Silk Road. I plan on using this lesson later this year with my freshmen.
There are three other resources I plan on using. The first would be the “Indo-European Language Tree” that shows the connections between those different languages. The second resource is a trading simulation that shows how goods would move along the Silk Road. The final resource I plan on using is the religion comparison charts. The charts contain quotes or saying from several different religions on key topics like good and evil and creation.
Overall, this is an excellent resource that I will be purchasing and using in my classroom. I would highly recommend this to any students.

Jenna O’Neill
Grade: 12
AP Human Geography
This curriculum unit is intended to help develop student understanding of the historical and cultural importance of the Silk Road. Through a series of eight lessons, students are introduced to the geographic location and magnitude of the Silk Road, the historical time periods when it was in use, the historical figures who used it or who were impacted by it, and the crucial understanding that humans have been able develop as we have through the exchange of ideas, practices, and resources.
A positive of this curriculum unit is that it successfully attempts to address multiple learning styles and pull cross content skills into the lessons. For instance, activities include creative thinking prompts, like asking the students to think about how they would conduct business if they were trading along the Silk Road. It also asks students to calculate the time it would take to travel the Silk Road by foot.
Overall, the unit would be excellent for seventh through ninth grade students as is. I also think that it would be valuable for upper level grades to help students to develop background knowledge or pieces could be used to introduce concepts that relate to the Silk Road, trade, and cultural exchange. The resources provided for students to gather information are excellent. They would offer age appropriate reading for middle through ninth grade students, but older students would need more opportunities to apply what they have learned to other concepts or historical analysis.
I would most definitely recommend looking into use of this resource for World History and Geography classes.

This curriculum unit is phenomenal as a stand-alone, hands-on exploration guide to the development and impact of the Silk Road across Eurasia from the first millennium BCE to the middle of the second millennium CE. The unit contains eight detailed lessons, ranging in length from two to four 50 minute class sessions for each lesson, with a content area focus for each lesson: geography, history, languages, trade, belief systems, arts, music, and migration plus a conclusion that focuses on translating the material into a discussion on modern-day globalization. Each lesson comes complete with audiovisual DVD materials, handouts, graphic organizers, maps, manipulative, etc. making it possible for educators to learn and teach the material in an extremely efficient manner. There is an abundance of resources included in each unit. Items can be used either individually or as part of the complete unit; teachers may pick and choose from the variety of resources provided based on their time and interests without having to complete each module. The goals of each unit (which are linked to national standards for each content area) can be extended far beyond the context of the Silk Road as you can easily translate these economic, political, and social concepts and challenges into the issues facing world trade today in order to give the unit a current events twist.
In an ideal situation, a school that uses team teaching could take one week to cover this unit, with various teachers presenting the information for one lesson related to their content area or area of interest. With each lesson, students are asked to complete both individual and group work, solving problems and meeting the challenges of becoming builders, artisans, and traders along the Silk Road. In terms of performance assessment, this curriculum unit does an excellent job putting students into roles where they are faced with creative problem-solving opportunities that require thinking and cooperation. Additionally, lessons can be set up with competing teams to add a bit of excitement to the challenges provided.
This is a SUPERB way to effectively use the last week before vacation when teacher creativity and student motivation may be at a low point. “Along the Silk Road” challenges students to put the knowledge they gained throughout the course of the semester to the test in a variety of simulations and activities while teachers enjoy using this time for educational gain.

This Curriculum unit, written in1993, contains 8 lessons plus a unit introduction for the teacher.It provides a great rationale for teaching this information and focuses on the Han-Roman period all the way to the 14th century. Each lesson is self-contained, but it is important to note that each lesson is NOT one day in length; if taught in full, this unit would take about 17 days (not including a summative assessment, if the teacher wants to design one). Each lesson (individually reviewed below) can stand on its own, allowing teachers to use one or all of the lessons, and there are ways to use parts of a lesson or to make the lessons shorter. One other piece that I love overall in this unit is that it incorporates a wide variety of strategies (none of which are lecture) and it incorporates the current Core Curriculum for Writing for social studies, specifically to write based on new information and ideas. Additionally, each lesson provides a pronunciation guide, which is very helpful to those of us who do not speak Chinese at all. For each video (yes, VHS), a transcript is included. Everything is complete: student worksheets, student information, questions to ask, etc. One warning: The group work is group work: it is not cooperative, so slackers could coast through this unit without much effort.
Lesson 1 - sets up students to write and keep a travel log through the unit as well as providing the maps necessary for keeping places and routes. available for their reference. A video about the geography of the silk road with transcript is part of this lesson. Students are put into groups and each group writes about a section of the Silk Road. Topics include the terrain, advice, etc.
Lesson 2 - the class is broken into six groups and they create "plays" or "tableaux" of the story of the journeys of one man who opened trade and diplomatic relations on the Silk Road. While interesting, a teacher pressed for time could explain this briefly and move onto another lesson.
Lesson 3 - In this jigsaw, the students focus on what was traded and how the flow of trade occurred. While the information is excellent and the idea is great, I do not personally like the way that SPICE set up the jigsaw. They put students into groups of 12 with the students then self-selecting themselves into six groups of two; these two are then the expert groups. Instead, I would suggest first putting students into six groups of 4 or 5 as experts. Then each of these students could then move into a jigsawed group that contains one person from each expert group for a total of six students per group. I think that is much more manageable regarding sharing of information and also allows teachers greater control about ability, leadership, etc. within the various groups. This lesson is one of the most important lessons in my mind as it focuses on trade and how the world became much smaller because of that.
Lesson 4 - Cross cultural communication. This lesson includes a video showing different cultural/regional groups and then has the students experience a simulation where they either have a greeting ("Hi. How are you?") or a response ("I'm fine, thank you" in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian or French. While this is a cute simulation of how languages had to be overcome, I think that the ensuing discussion about cultural norms (e.g., not offering someone meat or knowing to bow down) is more important, although less time consuming. Again, this is a lesson where a teacher pressed for time could condense the lesson easily.
Lesson 5 - In this lesson, students are once again in groups. They draw a section of a story (2 stories of travelers on the Silk Road) and then they present their picture to the class. This lesson could instead be converted into a Common Core for reading by finding the primary source materials or stories written and then students could answer in their travel logs the questions presented.
Lesson 6 - A really lovely Reader's Theater is presented for this lesson, focusing on the Golden age of the Tang Dynasty. While the lesson suggests 2 to 3 periods so students can rehearse, I have found that as long as students have decent reading skills, no practice is necessary. Again, that would be up to a teacher's discretion and the amount of time available to teach this unit. The second part of this lesson has students in groups create poster presentations about any part of the silk road that they choose. I think this would be better undertaken individually as an individual formative assessment. The questions presented could be discussed as well (if not better) if students completed this individually.
Lesson 7 - Students are able to timeline changes along the silk road in terms of people, empires, discoveries. All of the items to go on the timeline are already given by the authors; the students only need to copy them onto a timeline. I would suggest having the students do the research themselves (perhaps on the computer) or less information being given (e.g., just a list of events without the dates). Otherwise, it's just a copying exercise. I would also suggest having the teacher create the timeline with every 100 years blocked off on long sheets and hand them out to each group ; this way, the timelines can be hung up above/below each other and students can easily see and compare the events.
Lesson 8 - This is the other lesson that I thought was exceptionally important. Great handouts and a cool idea for 6x6 tiles for students. (Again, I would have them do it individually, not in groups). This is a wonderful summative lesson to tie the unit together and to help the students understanding the impact and importance of the Silk Road.

9th Grade Social Studies Teacher
Plum Borough School District
Summary
Along the Silk Road is a curriculum unit that pertains to the economic, social and global impacts the Silk Road had on China as well as the rest of the world as a whole. The curriculum is designed to help students understand that the world has always been interdependent and that it is not just a recent phenomenon of our time. Upon completion of the curricular unit, students will be able to
• understand how humans have always been interdependent due to exchange of ideas, culture, trade, food and music, etc.;
• recognize how trade has influenced culture and culture has influenced trade throughout history;
• recognize the diversity of the world and appreciate the interdependence of cultures and the benefits of exchange; as well as
• place the cultural and economic exchange that occurred on the Silk Road into historical context. (Spice, pg. 4)
Students are able to meet these curricular objectives by participating in the nine individual lessons laid out in the unit. Each of the nine lessons pertains to a unique topic about the Silk Road. Topics include geography, history, language, religion, art, music, technology, migration and globalization in conjunction with the Silk Road. Each lesson contains essential questions, suggested time frame for completion, an introduction on the topic, objectives for the individual lesson, materials (included in the curricular unit as well as on a cd-rom for effortless reproduction) and equipment list, ideas for teacher preparation, procedures including step-by-step daily instructions as well as suggested assessments. The ninth and final lesson in the unit is an all encompassing activity that asks students to recall the content knowledge which they have learned throughout the unit and relate it to the modern day world in which they live in.
Age Appropriate
The creators of this curriculum unit suggest its use in grades 6 through 12. I agree with the creators that the historical topics and content are more appropriate in a secondary setting. However, there is a section in the curriculum unit that provides assistance to elementary school teachers on how to make the appropriate adaptations for younger children to be able to engage with the content.
Recommendations For The Classroom
This curriculum can be used in its entirety or chunked to fit the educational needs of the course. The curriculum would be most effective if used in a social studies, geography, art history, religious studies, world history and/or music classroom. The curriculum does address the unique learning styles teachers face in the classroom. Within the curriculum unit, the teacher will find reading comprehension activities, whole group scenarios and simulations, map reading/plotting activities and individual as well as group assignments and projects. This is a very diverse curriculum unit designed to ensure full comprehension of the subject matter regardless if it is used in its entirety or as individual lessons.

If you're looking for a simulation of trade and travel along the Silk Roads in the post-classical period, this wonderfully written play prepared by the SPICE program will give your students the names of peoples, places, and goods that made the Silk Roads famous. Students from 6th to 12th grade will enjoy reading the lines of the travelers and making the sounds of the animals commonly found along these routes.