Create a market for Marco Polo to trade at

We tend to think of history as a boring, and sadly that’s how many teachers treat it.  When I teach our homeschool history lessons I try my best to make it fun, and with young children that means allowing them the chance of pretend play.  As part of our Marco Polo unit we created a super fun Marco Polo pretend play.

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How we set up our Marco Polo pretend play

we gathered the various toys in our house to set up several stores, our pretend food* made a good place to stop and eat, they also created “Chinese” money (I was going to suggest our pretend money*, but they had fun making the money), and a few other odds and ends

Then I let the kids have about 5-10 minutes to set up everything.  They happily arranged several different “stores” for Marco Polo to trade in, and created a special trading table for any deals to be finalized.

Rules for the Marco Polo pretend play

Once the area was all set up I laid out our ground rules:

1. Each person was going to get a turn as the store owner, a worker in the market, and as Marco Polo
2. The current store owner set the wages for the worker and the prices of the market
3. If you are the worker or Marco Polo you may attempt to negotiate with the store owner, but the store owner gets final say on what they are willing to give
4. The money earned as the store owner is used to pay the worker
5. The money earned as the worker was used when you were Marco Polo to buy items

Then I let them loose to see what they would do.  They had a lot of fun pretending to negotiate prices, but they weren’t very good at it (not that I am either).  The store owner quite frequently wanted to be nice and practically gave away the stuff.  But it was quite amusing to hear them loudly calling out to entice people to their store front.

After a while I took a turn as the different roles, and that was even more amusing, but for obvious reasons there are no pictures when I participated.

Fun details the kids came up with for our Marco Polo pretend play

Superman found one of our wooden boxes* and used it as his lock box.  I thought that was quite a creative use of the materials.

To simulate the different setting of China they opted to use the exercise balls for chairs, which amused the heck out of me, especially when they rolled around a bit too much and fell off the ball.

Their enthusiasm for pretending to clean was quite hilarious.  If only they would show that same enthusiasm when cleaning in real life.

This finishes up our Marco Polo unit.  Of course this Marco Polo pretend play was part of our inspiration for our Marco Polo writing prompts.  Next up in our Age of Exploration unit we have our random explorers to teach you about.  I’ve got some writing to get going on.