I was at the library looking for some books on Chinese New Year, and they were all checked out, but I found a great book on Buddhism, and thought, “Score!” That’s our next history lesson, the “Ancient India lesson”, interactive lesson, check.
Only to get home and discover it wasn’t on Buddhism, it was on Hinduism, so remember book for later, and rethink lesson. Think, think, think.
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Wondermaps {affiliate link} to the rescue!
I opened up my copy of wondermaps, went to “The World, Continents, Regions, Nations,” then clicked on Asia, and then India and got their fully realized and super cool looking map of India.
But that was too busy for my purposes, so I went through and took out a bunch of layers.
This is our map of India after I took out about 6 layers of stuff. I only needed borders, country names (and I could have left that out), rivers, river names, and terrain.
Then the REAL India lesson got started.
India Lesson: map work
After we read the lesson in Mystery of History 1, I walked them through what that really meant. First we found the Indus River and the mountains.
Then we added in the two major people groups from the lesson and where they originally came from. The Aryans were on the other side of the mountain and crossed over.
For reasons not gone into in the lesson the Aryans decided to attack the Dravidians, I’m going with the Dravidians had better resources. Or maybe the Aryans had a drought, and needed food.
But the end result was the Aryans won, and like many conquering nations they saw themselves as superior. Ironically enough the Aryans had lighter skin than the Dravidians (something for me to look into, is this where Hitler got the term “Aryan race?”), and so thought themselves superior.
Now we get into the:
Hinduism lesson
They then put together the caste system.
Afterwards I found a great visual to illustrate the caste system of the time from this site, so I shrunk it down to 1/4 page size and gave it to the kids for them to get a proper visual.
I was quite proud of myself because I found a great way to relate it to something we knew, we’d just watched the Deep Space Nine season 4
Then I brought up Jeff works with several people from India, and so the kids wanted to ask him about India and learn more. So, we headed off to lunch and the kids spent the entire meal peppering him with questions, and afterwards they wrote down what they learned from Jeff.
Translated: “If you did good you moved up and if you did evil you moved down. If you were priests or warriors you were rich.”
Jeff made sure to emphasize to the kids they don’t have a caste system anymore, but I think we’ll have to go through that a few more times before it sinks in.
I gave them instructions of taping the two added pieces into their notebooks so they could be “flapped” aside to read the papers underneath. That didn’t quite happen.
Not quite what I was thinking, but it works for them.
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