Sugar Changed the World

Use these activities to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity. 

ACTIVITY 1: “Visual History of Sugar”

The authors of Sugar Changed the World have given you a lot of information about the history of sugar, including:

• how and why it became a global commodity
• how and where it was produced
• how and why the rise of this industry impacted various groups of people

Choose one of these three strands to focus on as you make a visual representation that demonstrates your understanding of the Complexity of History.

Part A: Go back through the book and make note of the key information about your topic. As you gather information, remember that your project will attempt to show your understanding of the complexity of your topic.

As you make notes, think about how the information fits together. Do you see a lot of cause-and-effect relationships? Chronological or spatial relationships? Are you looking at a process? Thinking now about how the various details relate to one another will help you in the next step of this project.

Part B: Decide how you will visually represent the information that is given about your chosen topic in Sugar Changed the World. Choose a way to represent the information that lets you demonstrate the relationships among time, people, events, geography, and so on. You might choose one of the methods on the following list, or choose a method of your own:

•  flow chart
• See this tutorial on Mindtools.
• You can use Canva or another similar platform to create a flow chart, or you can create one by hand.
• bubble map
• See this 4-minute YouTube tutorial from Metacognition.
• You can use Canva or another similar platform to create a bubble map, or you can create one by hand.
• Prezi or another dynamic presentation
• See this 15-minute YouTube tutorial from The Prezenter.
• You can find Prezi here.

Part C:  Create your visual representation.

Teaching Suggestion: This project can take part of a single class period or much longer, depending on how you choose to structure it. You can condense the time needed by allowing students to work in small groups and by eliminating the option to use online platforms, confining their options to quick, hand-drawn representations. Conversely, you can expand the project by asking students to work individually and establishing rigorous guidelines about how detailed, complex, and visually engaging you expect the final product to be.

For Part A, give students examples of the kind of information they should look for in the text—help them distinguish between what is and is not relevant for the purposes of this project. In Part B, students may be tempted to choose whichever method of representation they are most familiar with, but encourage them to use the method that is best suited to their particular topic by talking about the strengths and weaknesses of each method.