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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.
Comments
14 responses to “India lesson (and some Hinduism)”
Very interesting study! Hinduism..Buddhism…Sikhism…all the other -isms, all very confusing! 🙂
They always confused me in high school, mainly because I went from not knowing any of them to suddenly having all of them in a short span of time.
Whatever works for them is what I say. This is a very interesting lesson. I love how you taught it. And, yes, I believe that is the same Aryan race that Hitler spoke of.
It does feel right for it to be the same, but it amuses me in a way I can’t really explain that it is the same.
That’s what I try to say, but the very little perfectionist in me says, “That’s not how I want it to look!” That perfectionist is dying a rather slow painful death with my free spirit kids, thankfully it’s a very small perfectionist.
All those “-isms” are really not that confusing if people take time to understand them. I thought Story of the World gave an excellent intro to hinduism, buddhism, and caste system in India. When we studied India, I had Smarty meet with several of my own India coworkers, so they could answer her questions about India – very similar to what you did with Jeff, but directly from the source 🙂
I think as they were taught when I was in high school they can be confusing because it’s taught suddenly and all at once, so you’re getting about 10 of them thrown at you at once, and several are similar in style, Hinduism/Buddhism and Socialism/Communism, but very different when you look in more detail.
But, I’d agree once you take the time to understand them they’re not that confusing. Though, at some point I’d love to find some good books about Hinduism, my library has tended to have good books on Buddhism, but not Hinduism so I’m not at familiar with the stories.I’m jealous of being able to interview “directly from the source,” since I don’t actually know the people I’m sure they would have been very confused, so we got the next best thing 😉
My kids always have their own take on projects like this, as well – when we do them at home. They follow directions perfectly as school, as far as I can tell.
I wonder how my kids do with projects at Sunday School. As I think about it, they tend to have their own take on a lot of those as well, that or they convince their Sunday School teachers to give them extra materials, because it rarely looks like what is expected.
We haven’t got to studying Hinduism yet, but we did make a rather magnificent India Map from biscuit and candy. Edible geography – doesn’t get much better than that!!
https://angelicscalliwags.com/category/history-ancient-indus-civilisation/It certainly can’t.
I’m saving the really in-depth studies of other religions for junior high when they’re a bit more able to do some comparisons than they are right now.
Great lesson!! Way to improvise when the book wasn’t what you were expecting!! Yay for learning over lunch 🙂
I love learning over lunch, we do lots of watching Netflix streaming as we eat lunch. It makes for some fun discussions.
That’s a great idea!! We might just do that today!!
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