Economics and You

Understanding economics, what some people call "economic literacy," is becoming essential for citizens in our national and increasingly interconnected world economy. Increasingly, productive members of society must be able to identify, analyze, and evaluate the causes and consequences of individual economic decisions and public policy including issues raised by constraints imposed by scarcity, how economies and markets work, and the benefits and costs of economic interaction and interdependence. Such literacy includes analysis, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making that helps people function as consumers, producers, savers, investors, and responsible citizens. - From the Michigan Grade Level Content Expectations

Material Type: Textbook

Authors: Arsenau, Ronalyn, Balzar, Travis, Dutcher, Kelly, Hintz, Katie, Noga, Kim, Weaver, Brian

1. How Do We Know?

How do we know about the past? Did a giant flood actually occur? Or were the stories of Gilgamesh and Noah folk tales intended to provide moral guidance?

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

1a. Archaeologists and Their Artifacts

This section describes the history and practice of archaeology

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

1d. Geographers and Their Space

Humans are curious creatures, always wondering what lies beyond the horizon. Lewis and Clark did not describe themselves as geographers, but they might well have. Geography is the study of the surface of the earth. It is about people and places. It is about the physical character of a country, its climates and landscapes, and its biological environment.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

Ancient World History

Seventh grade students will review the tools and mental constructs used by historians and geographers. They will develop an understanding of Ancient World History, Eras 1 – 4. Geography, civics/government, and economics content is integrated throughout the year. As a capstone, the students will conduct investigations about past and present global issues. Using significant content knowledge, research, and inquiry, they will analyze the issue and propose a plan for the future. As part of the inquiry, they compose civic, persuasive essays using reasoned arguments.

Material Type: Textbook

Authors: Hinken, Thomas, Soderquist, David, Stiegle, Amy, Voss, Lisa, Wrzesinski, Eric, Zigray, Steve

Library Databases

An overview of databases that staff and students can access including BookFlix, FreedomFlix, ScienceFlix, and TrueFlix.

Material Type: Interactive

Author: Kat Rogers

Teaching With Documents: Lesson Plans

This section contains reproducible copies of primary documents from the holdings of the National Archives of the United States, teaching activities correlated to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government and cross-curricular connections.

Material Type: Lesson Plan, Primary Source, Teaching/Learning Strategy

Primary Source Documents: Railroads

Examine a collection of primary source documents about railroads in the United States.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Primary Source, Reading

Prioritizing Evidence to Address a Document-Based Question

Tenth-grade students in Claire Wolff's humanities class at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in New York City think like historians to curate a collection of primary source documents that are the best match for a Document-Based Question similar to what they will encounter on New York State's global history and geography Regents exam.

Material Type: Teaching/Learning Strategy

What is History? Timelines and Oral Histories

This lesson plan addresses the ways people learn about events from the past and discusses how historical accounts are influenced by the perspective of the person giving the account. To understand that history is made up of many people's stories of the past, students interview family members about the same event and compare the ifferent versions, construct a personal history timeline and connect it to larger historical events, and synthesize eyewitness testimony from different sources to create their own "official" account.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Unit 1: Foundations for Early World History

HISTORY H1 THE WORLD IN TEMPORAL TERMS: HISTORICAL HABITS OF MIND Evaluate evidence, compare and contrast information, interpret the historical record, and develop sound historical arguments and perspectives on which informed decisions in contemporary life can be based. Compelling Questions: How does historical thinking help us understand our world?   Chapter Supporting Questions: How do we learn about the past? Does thinking about the world with historical habits of mind help to make a better world? How would you describe temporal thinking? Provide a scenario or specific event to illustrate. What steps and tools do historians use to do their job? How do historians collect and analyze evidence? How do historians use evidence to construct theories, perspectives and hypotheses  (claims), and accounts about the past? How and why are these historical claims controversial?

Material Type: Lesson

Author: Amy Striegle

2b. Food, Clothing and Shelter

For Neanderthal Man, each and every day was a challenge. What was life like for Neanderthals? How did early humans find food, make clothing, and seek shelter?

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

2c. A Page Right Out of History

Because there was no written language 50,000 years ago, we do not have much information on how a "modern stone age family" lived, what they ate, where they lived, what they wore, or even what they looked like. Like Fred Flintstone, did they have leopardskin suits, go barefoot, and use a boulder for a bowling ball?

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

2d. First Technologies: Fire and Tools

People of the Stone Age did not have the luxury of turning on the TV and watching Tim "Rock" Taylor host "Tool Time" or Bob Vilastone giving home-building tips in "This Old Cave." Nor could they dial 911 when a fire threatened them. Rather, they had to invent tools and harness the power of fire. But it was their experiments in tool-making that ultimately led to TV, cell phones, and computers.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

Cave Art: Discovering Prehistoric Humans through Pictures

By studying paintings from the Cave of Lascaux (France) and the Blombos Cave (South Africa), students will discover that pictures can be a way of communicating beliefs and ideas and can give us clues today about what life was like long ago.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Lesson 1: The Phoenicians and the Beginnings of the Alphabet

This lesson is about the Phoenicians, who invented the alphabet inherited by the Greeks, Romans, and eventually, us.

Material Type: Lesson Plan

Esri GeoInquiries™ for schools

GeoInquiries™ are short, standards-based inquiry activities for teaching map-based content found in commonly used textbooks. Each activity is designed using a common inquiry model and can be presented quickly from a single computer and projector or modified for students’ hands-on engagement. Collections of 15-20 activities per topic complement your curriculum throughout the year. Incorporates use of maps into every activity. Various content areas and levels, aligned to standards, all CC By NC SA

Material Type: Activity/Lab

How did we get here?

This unit emphasizes the diaspora of human history.   Sixth graders are by nature a myopic people, and constantly in danger of not examining their own assumptions. Teaching large scale human history as a beginning to a closer study of culture, movement patterns and events allows students to understand the miraculous conditions that allowed humans to flourish. The perspective we take in this unit also challenges students to consider that the choices we make always provide a set of positive and negative consequences. In past pedagogy, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture was taught as the catalyst of human progress. While that is not entirely wrong, it limits students' thinking by not considering the things we lost with this "opportunity cost."   In keeping with the new geography-heavy 2015 standards, this unit begins with a role-playing simulation that asks students to learn specific biomes to imagine they are plopped down in a certain region of the world, with nothing but a basic tool kit (no clothing, food, or shelter!). Right away students understand the complexity of early survival and the interrelationship with the environment. Then, building on the interpretive skills they learned in Unit one, student examine cave paintings to hypothesis lifestyle choices and necessities for early paleolithic peoples. Students recall the mapping skills learned in Unit One to get a visual perspective of the human diaspora in the next lesson, which maps the migration out of Africa, and sets the stage to understanding the next big topic: shifting from hunting and gathering to an agrarian way of life. But first, students will culminate their learning of early humans in an analysis of the issue of who gets the rights to study Kennewick man's remains.   **From the new AAPS 6th grade curriculum; written by Rachel Toon for ATLAS

Material Type: Unit of Study

Author: Emily Zheutlin

39a. Education

Demands for better public education were many. Employers wanted a better educated workforce, at least for the technical jobs. Classical liberals believed that public education was the cornerstone of any democracy. Our system of government could be imperiled if large numbers of uneducated masses voted unwisely.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading

3a. Life along the Nile

None of the achievements of the remarkable ancient Egyptian civilization would have been possible without the Nile River. There is always a connection between landscape and how a people develop. It does not take the wisdom of a sphinx to understand why.

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Reading