Content goals

QUARTER ONE

The Amerindian, European, and African settlement of the Western Hemisphere

Key Topics: 

• The Native American Settlement of the Western Hemisphere and Wisconsin Native American Civilizations
• The Columbian Exchange:  Evangelization, Trade, and Exchange.
• French and British colonization; the 7 Years War

QUARTER TWO

The Revolutionary War, and the U.S. Constitution, and the early Republic

• From Resistance  to the American Revolution
• The U.S. Constitution, its political principles, the ways in which citizen participate in the American political system with special emphasis on Wisconsin government
• The Early Republic and Western Migration and the early Catholic missionary church

QUARTER THREE

The Antebellum Era and the U.S. Civil War

• The Age of Andrew Jackson
• The Slavery Crisis
• The U.S. Civil War

QUARTER FOUR

The Reconstruction Era and the Gilded Age

• The Challenge of Reconstruction
• The “Old” West
• The Gilded Age and the Missionary Church

Recitations:

Students perform recitations on the Kipling’s Six Honest Serving Men (the journalist’s questions), the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

In the 7^th grade, students are introduced to the 5 Themes of Geography:  Location, Place, Human-Environment Interaction, Movement, and Region.  Students should be able to know and identify the following:

• Pre-historic and Age of Exploration Settlement Patterns
• North and South American Physical Regions
• Patterns of Western Expansion: Surveyance, Land Speculation, Trade, Migration
• Native American Settlements
• 19^th Century Immigration Patterns
• Ecological Succession in Wisconsin—the impact of glaciers and humans in south central Wisconsin.
• The Chesapeake Bay
• The 50 States
• The Slaveholding States
• The States of the Confederacy

Analysis Goals

Secondary Sources

• SQR3 reading method
• Formulating reading questions for texts without heading

Primary Sources

• Understand the distinction between primary, secondary, and inspired sources
• Interpret a written primary source according to the three steps of primary source analysis
• Interpret an historical object
• Interpret a religious artifact
• Know how to take a position on a historical question using evidence from primary and secondary sources.
• Analyze political documents such as the Declaration of Independence and The U.S. Constitution as foundations of U.S. political philosophy

Chronological Thinking

• Students learn how to organize important events in chronological order through timeline exercises.
• Students understand the rationale for historians’ use of periodization
• Understand the concept of Historical Context both in terms of “big” context and “little” context

Historical Thinking

• Explain how a historian’s claim or argument is supported with evidence.
• Identify the main point of a paragraph
• Students learn to frame questions that can be answered by historical study and research
• Students are able to identify, explain, and utilize the six questions historians use to interpret historical events and processes
• Students recognize the role of chance, contingency, and error in history
• Students learn to define terms using a Frayer Diagram.
• Students learn how to assess the historical significance of a person, group, event, document, process, or idea.

Composition Goals

• Write a summary from a section in a history textbook, or primary source
• Write a precis of a short primary source
• Know how to write a definition using a Frayer Diagram
• Writing a historical definition based on Theon’s 6 (the Journalist’s questions).
• Using a text to write an answer to the “Thinking Like a Historian” Questions
• Writing a “claim” paragraph:  claim (topic sentence), two sentences of evidence, one sentence of analysis.
• Using reading questions to write “research” notes
• Cornell Notes (writing notes in rudimentary outline form, writing annotations, mnemonic devices and self-test questions in left column, and summaries of notes on bottom row)
• Outlining textbook sections and chapters
• Writing Primary Source Analysis
  • Placing artifact in its historical context
  • Interpreting the artifact by identifying keywords and central sentences
  • Explaining what the artifact reveals about history
• Reverse Outlining
• Keyword Outlines
• Formulating Research Questions
• Capitalization Rules
• Recognizing comma splices