Our Week in Review - China and Korea

Last week we learned about China. I love how Tapestry has all of us in the same time period, but at a level that is appropriate for each of the children's age and maturity. We are up to the 1950's now, and spent a week focusing on events in China leading up to that time. While our daughter learned about communism, the Chinese civil war, and Mao Zedong, our upper grammar son learned interesting facts about China's land, animals, and plants, and had just an introduction to Mao and communism, while our lower grammar boys focused on China's land, animals, and people.

I checked out a bunch of books from the library on China, and our boys had fun just looking and gleaning what was interesting to each of them. I read a little from the books here and there, but mostly let them choose what to look at.


Then we worked on our history lapbooks, making an information wheel about China.


Even our 7 year old son C, who still has difficulty writing for any length of time, enjoyed this!

And Little Man, who did no writing in his wheel, had fun drawing pictures of his own choosing (not necessarily from a book, so the whole China aspect is not really present ;-)).

(here is his made up animal!)


That Friday night, instead of our usual pizza, we had Chinese food! We spread out a blanket on the floor to catch the spills and ate right on the floor as many Chinese still do today. The boys sat cross legged and us girls sat on our knees or sideways. And we all used chopsticks, which was quite hilarious!


Fortunately, I brought back some dishes from my time in Japan many years ago, so we were able to use authentic rice bowls and separate plates for our other food, just as many Asians do. I'm glad I brought back 8 of everything ~ back then I had no inkling I would one day have a family of 7!




This week we are focusing on Korea and learning a bit about the Korean War. One activity we did this week was to try our hand at Chinese and Korean calligraphy. Here, the two youngest boys are painting the Korean vowels. They have 10!



Daughter G chose to write a series of Chinese Kanji that actually made sense when put together. She ended up with several phrases, this first one is "infant crow practices flying" (or at least that's what we think it says!).





One of the questions our daughter had to answer last week in preparation for her online history discussion with our virtual co-op, was "what is your opinion of how Mao Zedong rose to power?". Our daughter struggled with this for a bit. It is so much easier to answer factual questions. We are at the stage with her where we are teaching her how to answer more open-ended questions, or questions like this one that ask for her opinion and she must think through all that she has learned about a particular person and then analyze the information to reach some conclusion. It is exciting to work with her and see the growth happening.

For this particular question, we talked for about 15 minutes about events in China leading up to WWII, and its immediate aftermath. The struggle for power between the Nationalists and the Communists, how they came together to fight their common enemy, the Japanese, after the Japanese invaded. How after Japan was defeated in WWII, China resumed her civil war. We learned what kind of strategist Mao was, and how he believed staunchly in the power of the peasants and was ultimately able to gain control and bring China under the communist banner. We talked about his personal life, his motivations, and his beliefs about violence (in stark contrast to Gandhi's views on non-violence, which we had learned about the previous week). After all that, I asked her the question again, and opinions began to just pour from her like water! I think even she was surprised by what she knew and what she thought. Tapestry encourages students to back up their opinions with facts they learned during their reading that week, and ultimately, with Scripture. I love that our history curriculum is helping me teach my children HOW to think!

Each week I find myself even more grateful for the wonderfully rich and deep and fun curriculum that Tapestry of Grace is! Besides teaching us how to think, I so appreciate the emphasis they put on learning about other cultures and nations, and how events in one part of the world connect to events elsewhere. My prayer is that God will use this to help develop in our children hearts of compassion for the world, and an awareness of God's hand throughout history.