Teacher's Guide for the Ancient Environment

Once they understand that different places have different climates, you could begin to introduce the idea of climate change over time, and what sorts of things cause climate change. It might be interesting to have a debate over it: should people have cut down all the trees to make iron? What would have happened if they had saved the trees instead? How could things have been done differently? You'll probably want to relate this to modern global warming.

If your kids are good readers, you might want to try Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel, which argues that most of the reason why Eurasians dominate the world and Africans don’t is environmental – that the Eurasians had environmental advantages that were not available to the Africans. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, but it shows how important the environment is to history.

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