The Silk Roads
Teacher Resources
Lesson Guide
This guide includes all the usual stuff on pacing, guiding questions, and sample answers, but it will be especially useful as you prepare to teach the Silk Road Simulation activity that closes this lesson.
Diverse Perspectives on the Silk Roads: The Sogdians
OER Project partnered with NYU to learn more about the Silk Roads. Check out this presentation.
Driving Question: How did the Silk Roads forge connections in Afro-Eurasia?
Learning Objectives:
- Explain the causes and effects of the growth of networks of exchange after 1200.
- Identify and describe a historical context for a specific historical development or process.
How can you answer a question if you aren’t sure what that question is asking? Practicing prompts promotes quality answers to challenging questions!
Highlight an illustrative example and help your students make connections with a deep dive on the middlemen who helped keep the Silk Roads alive as the Roman and Han Empires died. Share historian Bennett Sherry's blog post about who built the Silk Roads with your students.
Some things are built to last, whether the Roman aqueducts or the Silk Road. Dynasties come and go, but the infrastructure they built can last lifetimes.
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Guiding Questions
For every product traded from place to place, so much more than that product is transported: there are people communicating ideas, cultures coming into contact with one another, and even germs being exchanged!
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Guiding Questions
Students may assume global trade only affected rich empires or luxury consumers. Having students compare this video on medieval guilds with the Silk and the Song Dynasty video in Unit 1 will help them see how trade reshaped labor, class, and production at many levels, from women producing silk in Song China to wool workers and guild members in medieval England.
Guilds and wool and trade, oh my! You’ll learn all about how Jolly Old (medieval) England was a mover and shaker in the world economy of that time!
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Guiding Questions
You can use OER Project source collections in different ways. If your students aren’t ready to analyze multiple sources just yet, have them focus on one of the sources in this collection by asking them to analyze the historical context, the author’s purpose, point of view, or audience to help them practice their sourcing skills.
Networks of exchange are about so much more than the goods being bought and sold; they are about the diffusion of ideas and the spread of new technology—as well as disease. Use the Quick-Sourcing Tool to help you analyze these primary source excerpts.
As with most simulation activities, this one requires a bit of prep work (but the payoff is worth it!). Make sure to check out the Lesson Guide in advance so you have everything you need. In particular, don’t forget to download the Silk Roads Goods Cards and the Regional Guide Cards ahead of time!
This is a teacher and student favorite activity. One AP teacher chose it as her Unit 2 must-do, saying, “This simulation brings postclassical interregional trade to life, letting students experience the challenges and excitement of distant markets firsthand.”
Want more tips on this activity? Tips such as booking out the library so that students can spread out their trade, or an AP-teacher-created slide deck to accompany the activity? Check out this community thread for lots of ideas!
Ever wonder what it would be like to be a trader back in the heyday of the Silk Road? Well, wonder no longer as this simulation puts you in the center of the action!
