To kick off our China study, we read the book Ping from Beautiful Feet Books. The kids really enjoyed this book. It mentioned cormorant fishing on a couple pages, and the kids had some strong feelings about it. After, we watched “The Art of Fishing with Birds”, which explained the practice from a cormorant fisherman’s perspective. We had good conversation, with some loving the idea and others feeling bad for the birds. I made a simple worksheet for them to express their opinions, then finished up the lesson with some watercolor and sharpie🎨
Panda day! Look how cute these little guys are 😍 We used @thewaldockway Traveling the World curriculum and learned about this endangered species. 🐼🎋 This 3D art used acrylic paint, little cardboard squares to create the bamboo, and panda pieces I printed out.
We learned all about Chinese New Year, its origins and made these cute dragons with crepe paper!
🐉 🇨🇳🏮🎇
We talked about one of the first emperors, Qin Shi Huang, who was a ruthless and cruel man. He felt threatened by anyone who challenged him, including the intellectuals and scholars of the day. China was the first civilization to invent books, which they created out of stick bamboo—even before paper. The emperor ordered all of the books to be burned except for those on farming and medicine. We wanted to write things on our books that the emperor might have burned, and the kids either chose a Bible verse or pledge of their allegiance to the one true God instead of an emperor. This was also the same emperor that started the building of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army. We also had a really great conversation about the current authoritarian communist government, and how it might sound nice in theory, but in reality it’s not good for the people. We were able to discuss differences between that and a democratic republic 🇺🇸 I made egg rolls for the kids, too!
Lastly, we learned about the Great Wall. We took a virtual field trip and saw what it would look like if we were standing on the wall. Talked about the process of how it was built and how many people it took to construct it over 1000 years. Did you know the Great Wall is the largest man-made structure in the world? It’s over 1000 miles longer than the length of the United States 😳 and is one of the seven wonders of the world. The kids painted their own great walls and a couple of them built a 3-D puzzle 🤩 🇨🇳🧱