Yellow River

Yesterday I taught Chinese History at the Dayton Christian Chinese Church. I had a group of about eight kindergarten students through second grade. This is our fourth week. We reviewed what we had learned previously about the Yellow River and how rivers can be a source of sustenance for people in providing fresh drinking water and irrigating farm lands. We talked about how water originated from snow fall on mountain tops which melted in the spring and collected into rivers which eventually flowed to the ocean. Some rivers collected into lakes and water from rivers can sink into the ground so that if you dig a well then you can get water. We examined the crops grown in China and the types of farm animals there. We did a hands on bartering exchange and pretended to row our goods up and down river to trade. We talked about China's greatest secret that lead to enormous wealth, silk. One student was chosen to be a moth egg that grew and grew into a caterpillar. Then when it ate and grew to sufficient size then it built a cocoon around it to metamorphisize into a moth. I played the hungry bird that was hungry and tried to eat cocoon the caterpillar had built around it but, choked from all the stringy silk that caterpillar had weaved within the cocoon. I simply spit that silk all of a cocoon right back out. I learned my lesson not to try and eat any more silkworm cocoons. A Chinese empress first discovered the silk threads within the silkworm cocoon and unraveled it to make clothing for her friends and family. Soon the technology spread in China but was a secret to the rest of the world and garnered China wealth for hundreds of years. We later talked about how people along the Yellow River used to hunt animals and gathered fruits until a person discovered that they can make plants grow from seed. People started to farm. We used our hands and arms to show how a seed sprouted into a plant, how the plant grew bigger and bigger. If there was rain then the plant grew more and more but when there was no rain, our plant wilted and we had to get water from the river to water our plant. With water our plant thrived and eventually began to bear fruit. The children plucked the pretend fruits off their pretend plant and had a lovely delicious nutritious pretend snack. People along the Yellow River had differences and disagreements so they had to come up with rules to regulate their community. When they couldn't agree on a rule, they chose an arbiter or a leader to decide for them. Concerns and complaints were brought to the leader, like wolves attacking their chickens and pigs. Our class leader decided to build a tall wall around the community to protect farms from wild animals. Later, some strangers from the north, the Mongols from Mongolia came and wanted to take what they had, their storage of crops and all their animals. Our class leader had to see which person in the community wanted to be a spy and collect information about the enemy. The leader had to see which persons would train in warfare and become soldiers. Then the leader decided how to negotiate peace with their enemies instead of fighting. 9/14/2013