Students in sixth-grade world history and geography classrooms learn about the lives of the earliest humans, the development of tools, the foraging way of life, agriculture, and the emergence of civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus River valley, China, Mesoamerica, and the Mediterranean basin. Although the focus is on ancient events and problems, this course gives students the opportunity to grapple with geography, environmental issues, political systems and power structures, and civic engagement with fundamental ideas about citizenship, freedom, morality, and law, which also exist in the modern world. Students practice history as an interpretative discipline. They read written primary sources, investigate visual primary sources, and learn how to analyze multiple points of view, cite evidence from sources, and make claims based on that evidence in writing and speaking.

Social Studies 7

The medieval and early modern periods provide students with opportunities to study the rise and fall of empires, the diffusion of religions and languages, and significant movements of people, ideas, and products. Over this period, the regions of the world became more and more interconnected. Although societies were quite distinct from each other, there were more exchanges of people, products, and ideas in every century. For this reason, world history in this period can be a bewildering catalog of names, places, and events that impacted individual societies, while the larger patterns that affected the world are lost. To avoid this, the focus must be on questions that get at the larger global, geographical, historical, economic, and civic patterns. To answer these questions, students study content-rich examples and case studies, rather than surveying all places, names, and events superficially. Students approach history not only as a body of content (such as events, people, ideas, or historical accounts) to be encountered or mastered, but as an investigative discipline. They analyze evidence from written and visual primary sources, supplemented by secondary sources, to form historical interpretations. Both in writing and speaking, they cite evidence from textual sources to support their arguments.

Social Studies 8

The eighth-grade course of study begins with an intensive review of the major ideas, issues, and events that shaped the founding of the nation. In their study of this era, students will view American history through the lens of a people who were trying—and are still trying—to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Throughout their eighth-grade United States history and geography course, students will face the themes of freedom, equality, and liberty and their changing definitions over time. This course will also explore the geography of place, movement, and region, starting with the Atlantic Seaboard and then exploring American westward expansion and economic development, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and finally, industrialization.

As in earlier grades, students should be taught that history is an investigative discipline, one that is continually reshaped based on primary-source research and on new perspectives that can be uncovered. Students should be encouraged to read multiple primary and secondary documents; understand multiple perspectives; learn about how some things change over time and others tend not to; and they should appreciate that each historical era has its own context and it is up to the student of history to make sense of the past on these terms and by asking questions about it.