Social Studies

Horizons K-8 Middle School History Overview

Objectives:
We believe in helping our middle level students analyze historical events critically through working with both primary and secondary source documents, texts, videos, and speakers from a variety of perspectives.  Each year of our three-year rotation of study focuses on essential questions that guide our instruction.  We believe in taking some aspects of history and looking at them in depth as opposed to covering a wide range of topics lightly.

Three-year progression:
Our three-year history cycle is as follows:

Rise and Fall of Ancient Civilizations (RF)
Ancient civilizations studied include Mesopotamia, China, Indus River Valley, Ancient Ghana and Zimbabwe, Ancient Maya, and Ancient Puebloan people of the Southwest United States.

Essential Questions:

• What are the factors that lead a civilization to form?
• What are the factors that lead a civilization to fall?
• Where are we on this continuum?

Explorations and Revolutions (ER)
Topics covered include the Renaissance in Europe; Scientific Revolution; Age of Exploration; Colonial America including Salem, the American Revolution; Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the French Revolution

Essential Questions:

• What is a revolution?
• What are the factors or circumstances that lead to a revolution?
• What factors lead to violence within a revolution?

Peace and War (PW)
Topics covered include slavery in the United State; the Industrial Revolution; the Civil War; Reconstruction; World War I; World War II; the Holocaust; the Cold War; the Cuban Revolution; Vietnam; non-violent movements that worked for change (i.e.: the Civil Rights movement; Gandhi; Anti-Apartheid movement; Solidarity movement in Poland) 

Essential Questions:

• What are the factors that lead to peaceful change?
• What are the factors that lead to non-peaceful change?

Students will cover all three of the cycles over the course of their middle school experience with us at Horizons.  For each of the three years, there are additional Friday Exploratory classes (8 hours each in total) in the areas of art history and technique as well as independent student investigations/study within the time period of the year.

Means through which we achieve objectives:
Our history curriculum is rich in literate experiences for our students gathering readings from a variety of resources into folders of study as opposed to focusing on any one textbook. This allows our students to benefit from the ever-changing historic research as well as provides students with a wide range of perspectives from which to critically analyze history and its lessons.  The process also helps them develop their close reading skills by providing them the opportunity to interact with/on the text.

Lessons are created to accommodate a variety of learning styles and levels of ability.  We incorporate both individual, paired, and group project assignments, lectures, hands-on projects, lectures, class discussions, and readings into our history curriculum.  We have unit assessments in the form of tests (essay, short answer, and oral), performance-based assessments in the form of presentations and projects.