Ancient Chinese Geography
Jennifer Reynolds -- Portola Middle School

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CA Standard:
  • Locate and describe the origins of Chinese civilization in the Huang-He Valley during the Shang Dynasty. 
  • Explain the geographic features of China that made governance and the spread of ideas and good difficult and served to isolate the country from the rest of the world. 
Lesson description:
Ancient Chinese Geography is actually interesting.  I personally prefer to lecture this topic with a powerpoint presentation.  I created my powerpoint presentation by using pictures from the History Alive! Ancient Civilizations textbook.  Unfortunately, I cannot obtain permission to publish them to this site, however, you can find or create your own visuals to go with this outline.  You can obtain a lot of public domain pictures at Wikipedia's Commons section.  All pictures on this site, including in the backgrounds are taken from public domain or a granted no profit license from Wikipedia. 
Division of Land:
The geographic terminology I chose is also from the History Alive! Ancient Civilizations.  It just makes sense and helps to divide the country we have now into regions that easily show the difficulty of communications across the large stretch of land in question.  The division also easily helps to explain where the origins of the Shang dynasty was and why.
Parts of the Lesson:
Please take a look at the outline in the handouts sections.  With it, I use the Chinese Geography Chart, which is created in Excel to help the students take notes.  If you do not have time to make copies, using cornel notes is another great way to have the kids organize the information.  After notes, they may also do a writing project explaining where they thought it was best to live and why or explain why people had a hard time communicating.