At the beginning of our Ancient China unit, the class filled out a KWL (Know, Want to know, and What I Learned). They were only able to fill out the K and W parts, however most of what people knew was about the Great wall of China. So the unit began by learning about the two rivers that the ancient civilization grew around: the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. The rivers would flood making the soil yellow and fertile. The class also learned about the natural barriers that surrounded Ancient China like the Gobi Desert, the Taklamakan Desert, the Himalayan mountains and also the China sea to the East. We learned about the characters they used in Chinese writing, and students were able to create their own characters for words like- mountain, market, army etc. and the rest of the class had to guess what their characters meant. This slowly integrated into learning about daily life in China and the kinds of jobs they had and who was in charge! We then learned about the significance of the Silk Road and how it not only traded goods, but ideas as well. Our read aloud book is even about the Silk Road and follows the journal of blue silk starting in China and making its way to Rome. We concluded our unit by learning about the different belief systems in China, like Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism. We did a walk through gallery of Confucius quotes, and even put them in our own words. By the end of our Ancient China unit, students were making constant references to what we learned in class.