Activity
1. Take just a few minutes to review
with the students the diverse areas that the foods, clothes,
vehicles, furniture, and luxury items that they use daily
come from. Then ask them to travel back in time mentally
to the Middle Ages. What is their impression of daily
life in that era? Do they think that trade was a vital
part of life then? What technologies made long distance
trade possible? You might need to help them connect to
ideas that they learned in history this week such as
trade being facilitated by different forms of transport
(animal powered vehicles, water powered vehicles), people
who specialized in trade such as merchants and traders,
and physical networks such as roads and actual cities
created to be centers of trade inland as well as port
cities.
2.
Next ask the students to think about the diseases that
were examined in the first two weeks of science
class. Which ones could have been around in the Middle
Ages? Make a list with your students. Here is a possible
list that your students could generate after covering
the material in the first week of science: cholera,
typhoid, dysentery, influenza, typhus, tuberculosis,
smallpox,
the Plague, schistosomiasis, and measles.
3.
Now the students will break up into small groups to discover
what goods were traded in the Medieval
world,
where these goods originated, which routes were used
to transport them, and which diseases may have been
spread through this type of trade by using the Trade
Route Matrix
that indicates which cities and goods are to be investigated.
They will use the following materials provided in
this
lesson: a chart of which areas produced which goods,
a topographical map of the world, and a map of the
location of important cities of the Medieval world.
Students are
also encouraged to use resources that are on the
Internet. Any information that the students have encountered
in science and/or history classes up to this point
can and
should be used. As a group the students fill in the
Trade Route Matrix that gives them seven cities and
seven different
items with which to work. They must discover the
place
of origin of the goods and figure out a logical route
that traders would have taken to bring that good
to a particular city while postulating which possible
diseases
also were being transmitted. For example, how did
silk
make its way to Venice? Then, the students need to
postulate what were the possible vectors of disease
involved in
that particular trade activity.
4. In the final portion of the lesson (one class
is suggested) go over the answers the students filled
in on the Trade
Route Matrix. Ask one group to show the route that
they reconstructed for how a certain item was transported
from point A to point B and which diseases may have
been
unwittingly transmitted in the process by using a
large
world map or an overhead of the world map given to
the students to chart the routes of trade. Always
ask if
the class found more than one possible route or more
than one disease that many have gone along for the
ride. Compare the routes and the probable diseases
that traveled
along with the goods and/or people.
Closure
There
are a number of key concepts that can be reviewed to tie up
the various strings of thought in this lesson. First, we often
think of the Medieval world as isolated and backwards. When
we look at the vast amount of trade that was taking place we
realize that this is erroneous. A wonderful array of goods
was available for those who had the means to purchase them.
And while the pace may have been slower than it is today, the
various regions of the world were still very much in contact
with each other. This meant that diseases from one area of
the world could be transported to another, though the vector
of their transmission might have been a mystery to the medieval
physician. Ask the students to remember the reading selection
from The Year of Wonders that they encountered in the first
week of English for this unit. What possible diseases might
have ravaged the small town that was described? Would the inhabitants
of the place have understood what had hit them or have had
any idea of how to combat the infection?
Homework
None |
Embedded
Assessment
Students
learning in this lesson should be assessed by the quality and
frequency of responses in the class discussions at the beginning
and end of the lesson, by the amount of engagement in the group
work, and by the quality of the written work on the Trade Routes
lesson matrix. |
