What's In That Bag?

What's in that bag? is a great way to get students to think outside the box.  In this project we were to create a artifact bag to present to our class.  I did my artifact bag on Ancient China and then used this activity in my unit plan.  I remember my sixth grade teacher using artifact bags every time she would introduce a new book that we were going to read in class.  By using the bag everyone got very excited to guess what we were going to read next. 

For my bag I placed three photos rolled up as scrolls in the bag along with three photos rolled up as scrolls taped to the front of the bag.  The three pictures were some common topics from Ancient China. 

Here are the three pictures from inside the bag:

The Great Wall of China
Terra-Cotta Warriors
Huang He/Yellow River
Students are to work together and come up with the names of the pictures and a fact or two about each one.  They then will create a slide with their information and then present it to the class.

At the end of all the presentations, the students will be instructed to take one of the scrolls of the front of the bag.  This will be their homework assignment.  When they opened the scroll there is a picture and website.  The student will need to research the picture at home and find 3-5 facts about the pictures.  The following day we as a class will review the homework pictures. 

Here are the three pictures from the outside of the bag:
Ancient Chinese Dragon 
Confucius
Shang Dynasty