Silk Roads and Sea Routes: When Worlds Trade

You need: five foods or spices from home or a supermarket (or their labels) · a world map · coloured string or pens · a notebook

1. Choose five items: for example pepper, cinnamon, tea, rice and sugar.
2. Find where each is grown or made. Check the label, then look it up.
3. Draw a line from each place to your town on the map.
4. Find out whether the same item travelled the Silk Roads or the spice routes long ago.
5. Measure the straight-line distance for each and add them up.

How you'll know: Your map shows five trade trails with distances, and you can say which items were also traded centuries ago.

Go further: Use Stats NZ data to find New Zealand's top three imports and exports. How are they different from the goods of the Silk Roads?

You need: six tables set up as trading cities · silk and pepper cards · play money or counters · a price-tracking sheet · event cards (bandits, sandstorm, new word, disease)

1. Each table is a city on the route, from Chang'an to Rome. Each city decides its profit and a tax.
2. Start with one bolt of silk worth 10 coins. Pass it from city to city.
3. At each city, add the profit and tax, and draw an event card.
4. Record the price at every stop and anything else that travelled with the silk.
5. Compare the final price with the start and discuss who got rich.

How you'll know: You can explain that goods passed through many traders, that each added a cost, and that ideas, words and diseases travelled too.

Go further: Replay the game with a sea route that skips three cities. What happens to the price and to the skipped cities?

You need: scrap paper torn into small pieces · warm water · a blender or stick blender (adult use only) · a mesh screen (fly screen stapled to an old frame) · a basin · old towels or cloths · a sponge

1. Soak the scrap paper in warm water for at least 30 minutes.
2. An adult blends it with more water into a smooth pulp.
3. Pour the pulp into the basin and slide the screen in, then lift it out flat with a thin layer of pulp.
4. Flip the pulp onto a cloth and press out the water with a sponge.
5. Leave to dry overnight, then write or print on your paper.

How you'll know: You have a dry sheet of paper and can explain the steps. You can say why cheap paper helped ideas spread (books, letters, records and money).

Safety: Only an adult uses the blender, and it is unplugged before anyone touches the blade. Mop up spills at once and keep water away from power points.

Go further: Add flower petals or harakeke fibres to the pulp and compare the strength of different sheets.

You need: a sewing needle · a bar magnet · a slice of cork or a leaf · a bowl of water · a real compass to check

1. Stroke the needle along the magnet 30 times, in one direction only.
2. Lay the needle on the cork and float it in the bowl of water.
3. Watch it turn and settle. Check it against a real compass: which end points north?
4. Move the magnet near the bowl. What happens?
5. Explain how a compass helped sailors when clouds hid the Sun and stars.

How you'll know: Your needle settles in a north–south line, and you can explain why that helped Chinese sailors by about 1000 CE and, later, European explorers.

Safety: Needles are sharp. Handle them carefully, count them out and back, and keep magnets away from phones and bank cards.

Go further: Find out how Pacific navigators found their way without a magnetic compass.

You need: a polystyrene food tray, cut flat · a blunt pencil · water-based printing ink or paint · a small roller or sponge · paper

1. Design a simple picture or a short word. Remember: it must be drawn back to front.
2. Press your design firmly into the foam with the blunt pencil.
3. Roll ink thinly over the foam.
4. Press paper on top, rub evenly, then peel it off.
5. Make five prints. Compare how long that took with copying by hand.

How you'll know: You have a set of matching prints and can explain why printing let books spread faster, from China's Diamond Sutra (868 CE) to Gutenberg's press (around 1450).

Safety: Use a blunt pencil, not a knife. Aprons on, and wash hands after inking.

Go further: Find out how Bi Sheng invented movable type around 1040 and why it was harder to use for Chinese characters than for alphabets.

You need: short simplified extracts from Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta or Xuanzang · a route map · a source-detective card · paper for a journal

1. Pick one traveller and read their extract twice.
2. Fill in the source-detective card: who, when, why, for whom.
3. Mark three places they visited on your map.
4. Write three journal entries in their voice, using only details from the sources.
5. Add a footnote to each entry saying which source it came from and how sure you are.

How you'll know: Your journal entries match real places and details, and each has a footnote naming its source and how reliable it is.

Go further: Find a place where two travellers describe the same city differently and explain why.

You need: six covered cups of whole spices (pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, star anise, cumin) · a world map · spice picture cards

1. Lift each lid and smell. Guess the spice and write your guess.
2. Check with the picture cards.
3. Place each card on the map where the spice grows.
4. Draw the route each spice took to reach Venice.
5. Discuss: which spice travelled furthest, and who controlled each part of the journey?

How you'll know: You can place at least four spices on the map and explain why spices from the Spice Islands were so valuable in Europe.

Safety: Smell only, no tasting. Keep spices away from eyes. Check the class allergy list before you start.

Go further: Find out how the Dutch East India Company took control of the nutmeg trade in the Banda Islands, and what that meant for the Bandanese people.

You need: a wall or large sheet split into four columns · evidence cards from the weeks · sticky notes in two colours

1. Label the columns: Who gained? Who lost? Who resisted? What changed?
2. Place evidence cards from the Silk Roads in one colour and the sea routes and empires in another.
3. For each card, write one sentence explaining why it belongs there.
4. Look for patterns: where was trade an exchange, and where did it become taking?
5. Write a class judgement answering the big question.

How you'll know: Every column has evidence from both case studies, and the class judgement uses evidence and considers more than one view.

Go further: Add a fifth column: 'What is still with us today?' and fill it with examples from Aotearoa.