What are we doing?

In Social Studies, we are learning about Silk Road and did many activities like Splendor, Mapping out the Silk Road and doing three rounds of Silk Road simulation to see which group have the most points. Splendor is a board game that is about getting different emeralds and using it to trade goods. There are different kind of points to choose to buy. Mapping out the Silk Road means that we get a world map and we need to label all the features of it, like mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, and large bodies of water. Finally we did the Silk Road simulation which each country needs to trade cards with other countries and whoever get the most points wins.

What are we learning?

We learned about the geographical barriers located along the ancient Silk Road by creating a 3D map, where regions are located and what goods do it have, and how a region can change base on its goods, technology, and beliefs.

What’s working?

In the Splendor activity, something that’s working is I can win the most points in the least amount of time, the way to do that is just find the most worthing card and buy it. Do not buy a lot of low points card because that will decrease your pionts. In the Silk Road simulation, I can understand how to effectively trade goods we want and how to scan people in many ways, to trade goods you want, you need to have the goods the other people want so you need to get that first. And to scan somebody, you can hide a disease card under the card you’re going to trade them.

What’s not working?

In the geographical features part, I am not able to remember all of the features like the mountains, rivers, lakes e.x.

Personal relevance

Learning Silk Road won’t really help me achieve my goals in life. But it can help me improve my Social Studies test score so I won’t get a low score on my social studies class.

  1. The three norms of Collaboration is pausing, paying attention to others, and putting ideas on the table.
  2. I am strongest at paying attention to myself and others because I don’t want to miss all the information my team said and I can participate if I listen carefully.
  3. I need to improve on putting ideas on the table because I don’t share ideas a lot when I am in a group and I want to help my group to improve on out project.
  4. During the Ancient Silk Road Unit, the learning activity that I like the most is the Silk Road simulation because in that simulation, we have diseases and we can scan people.