Ancient China Adventure Box

We start every unit study as homeschoolers with an adventure box. This post uncovers everything in our Ancient China Adventure Box. We will be doing our Ancient China unit in tandem with a Marco Polo unit, and I will be chatting about the Marco Polo adventure box in my next post. Yes, my children are getting two very exciting adventure boxes this term.

Check it out! Adventure boxes are an excellent way to encourage excitement for the term to come’s work. I have written an extensive post about them so do click and check them out.

We have already studied Ancient China when the children were younger, but this study will go much more in-depth and will contain some super hands-on activities. The purpose of using adventure boxes in a unit study, apart from the excitement element, is to expose the children to as many different topics/skills/knowledge. My great big homeschool goal is to create independent learners who are self-directed in whatever they are interested in. For this to happen, I need to expose them to a multitude of topics, not just history. This is why our unit studies are so rich in hands-on activities, law, politics, geography, science, literature, art, inventions…you name it, we try to include it. This enables a child to find out where their interests lie.

The Contents of the Ancient China Adventure Box

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Books

I just shopped around the house for these. Literally our cottage is held up by books! You could look in charity shops, car boot sales or library sales…Or if you are good at taking books back, borrow from the library!

Firstly, these are all the non-fiction books we used. The Eyewitness and Step Into books are fabulous and we use them for most of our unit studies.

Secondly, these are the literature books and biographical books we used. I always try to use some actual literature that was written in the time period or culture we are studying. In this case it was The Song of Mulan. The Lost Horse and The Empty Pot are retellings of old Ancient China tales:

Lastly, the children are given a selection of fiction books set in whatever the culture we are studying. I don’t pay too much attention to the reading age. All my older children are avid readers and like to be challenged. But, they also quite like an easier to read book for those low energy days. The goal is that they read all the books:

Hands-On Activities

One of the things we love doing as a family is charity shopping. We go to a nearby town and trawl through all the charity shops. It may look like we have an enormous number of activities when you read through my blog. And we do, but we don’t spend much money on them because they are all second-hand!

The first thing the children wanted to learn was calligraphy. Knowing I had one who’d enjoy the artistry, one who’d enjoy the fancy writing and one who would enjoy the technicalities of specifically the Chinese writing, I hit all three with a variety of packs:

Next up is a silk painting kit, using screen painting. This was primarily for Lillie who loves learning new art skills:

As the Chinese were the first inventors of paper (although not as we know it), I thought paper making might be fun to try out:

And last but not least we will be using The Warlords Puzzle to learn more about tangrams and I found a game in a charity shop, based around the ancient tangrams (seriously so blessed!) which has four beautiful carved wood sets of tangrams and a very thick book of ideas!

Free Printable Passport!

And last but not least, a play passport for you to print out and pop in your adventure box for each child:

The children will start their adventures in Ancient China in two weeks.  I’ll do a second post tomorrow about the Marco Polo resources we plan to use.

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I do have an educational YouTube channel where I post ideas for homeschool: AngelicscalliwagsHomeschool