GEOGRAPHY:
Hey there! So, today in geography, we began by watching a short clip of the "Mass Games" from the secret and mysterious communist country of North Korea (click here to watch.) We then began to talk about North Korea vs. South Korea, and discussing the following question: How does geography affect our culture and our identity? To learn more about this, we looked at PowerPoint slides and video of several cultures around the world. Click below to see them!
WORLD HISTORY:
Hello people! Today, in world history, we started with a "Civilization Walk." To do this, we started again with using our imagination that we were suddenly the only survivors (for a 300-mile radius) of a global disaster in which all man-made things were destroyed. We decided that the first thing we needed was WATER, and the second priority would be FOOD. So, we went outside in search of WATER. We found some water running off the roof and saw that the water was flowing to the West!!! We realized that water DOES NOT ALWAYS FLOW SOUTH!! We discovered that water flows DOWNHILL because it is pulled by gravity towards the center of the Earth (like all things).... and that sometimes hills slope down towards the East, West, and North.
We walked further and found where a stream flows on the other side of campus. We decided that we would follow this stream to a larger river (downhill, of course) and that there we would hunt animals that also came to the river to drink, eat plants that grew in the fertile soil, and hopefully meet other people.
In this state we were what are considered to be "Paleolithic People." We were hunter-gatherers and nomadic (see the slides below for definitions.) In history, at around 8000 B.C., women discovered plants growing out of their kitchen trash piles and realized that the seeds in the scraps they had thrown out were growing new plants. It was here that they discovered FARMING. This is called the "Neolithic Revolution." These Paleolithic People began to farm, corral animals, make new tools, and eventually became less nomadic. They became known as "Neolithic People." It was then that their population began to grow and they started to form large Civilizations. For descriptions of all these, see the slides we looked at in class below....
