WHAT'S HAPPENING THIS WEEKWEEK OF 10/22
This week we begin our unit on the early British settlements in North America: Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth. Students will be working on a simulation for the Jamestown settlement in which they have to make six critical decisions that will impact whether their settlement attempt survives or dies. WEEK OF 10/15 To wrap up our unit on the Age of Exploration, students are creating a map that will compare and contrast the experiences of Spain with that of England, France, and the Netherlands in terms of the regions explored, how they made their profits, what they were searching for, etc. This will serve as part of their assessment for the unit. This will be due on Wednesday, October 17. Also on Wednesday, there will be a short quiz on which students can use their comparison maps that they've made. WEEK OF 10/8 After looking at the Spanish experience in the New World, students will now analyzing the experience of the British, French, and Dutch. We're focused on where the explorers went, their experience with the indigenous people, and how the came to make a profit in the New World. WEEK OF 10/1 This week we'll be examining our second phase of the Age of Exploration, which includes the actual exploration of North and South America. This week's focus is on the Spanish and their conquest of huge areas of the New World. We'll watch a documentary on the Aztec Empire and how it came to an abrupt end when the Spanish arrived in the 1520s. WEEK OF 9/24 We will wrap up our first unit on the Age of Exploration as students evaluate two different arguments surrounding the costs and and benefits of the global shift to the western hemisphere. There will be a quiz on this first phase of exploration on Thursday, September 27. WEEK OF 9/17 This week we'll begin our short unit on the Age of Exploration. To start, we'll look at what started Europeans to begin exploring and some of the technology they used to do it. Later in the week, we'll start to examine a few of the first explorers, including Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. WEEK OF 9/10 We will do some more work this week with American Indian diversity and how geography directly impacts it. The students have already shown a solid grasp of all this, but we're using some data maps (precipitation, vegetation, and average temperatures) to compare with the types of houses several tribes used to make direct correlations between the local geography and housing options. We'll wrap up this unit with a test on Thursday, September 13. The focus of the test will be on how and why the first Americans arrived on the continent. WEEK OF 9/3 Students are beginning to look at seven different American Indian tribes from various regions of North America. Looking specifically at food and housing, students will start to form hypotheses about which region each tribe might live. Later in the week, we'll begin to put together picture slideshows of the various regions to showcase the physical geography of the regions and how that impacted each culture. WEEK OF 8/27 Students are taking a quiz on identifying the 50 U.S. states on a map. It's obviously a very simple quiz. I use it to start off with something rather simple, but also as a reference point to many of the things we'll discuss this year in U.S. history. It's worth only a small percentage of their grade...just don't tell them that! Later in the week we'll begin to take a brief look at how and why the first humans arrived in North America and some review of the Agricultural Revolution. |
7th Grade - U.S. History (40,000 BCE - 1789 CE)
This course covers the arrival of humans in North America through the creation of the United States Constitution.