Activities such as the World Zone Game, Age of Adventure, Claim Testing – Expansion and Interconnection, as well as several fun graphic biographies provide many opportunities for students to engage while learning about the expansion and global interconnection that took place as a result of the development of agriculture, larger cities and expanded networks.
I have several favorites. For the early age of exploration we read the biography of Marco Polo and after debriefing its content we heard this song. My students loved the Graphic biography on Zheng He and the ad hoc activity.
For the latest age of exploration this year I had less classes so unfortunately I could not assign the World Zone Cafe or play the World Zones game. Instead I assigned a mini book on one of the explorers. They used this Google Earth PBS resource to choose an explorer and write a mini book. These are some exemplars.
One resource I highly recommend for the Atlantic slave trade is this Interactive Slave Trade Map. It is extremely valuable to visualize and assess the scale of human slave trade. You can stop the timeline, click on one dot, and read detailed information about each ship. For my students this was a new approach to the topic. They learned that the scale of slave trade for the American colonies was smaller compared to the Caribbean and Brazil. Snapshots below.
Then I showed this short video with the story of Ghana's Slave Castle to gain understanding on the slave trade cycle.
