Starting Social Studies

Social studies was the subject I dreaded tackling the most. And, of course, it ended up being the easiest to plan and the most enjoyable for both of us on a daily basis.

The objectives for social studies were really hard for me to understand in the beginning. But, I think I finally figured them out. There are time periods we need to study that are called eras (World History Era Standards). The objectives need to be applied to each era separately whenever possible.


There are five main parts to the objectives:

·        History

·        Culture
·        Civics and Government
·        Culture
·        Geography and Environmental Literacy

On top of that, we also need to integrate the five themes of geography for each era (Five Themes of Geography):

·        Location
·        Place
·        Human-environment Interaction
·        Movement
·        Region

The only hard part ended up being finding an interesting book that somewhat aligned with the eras. My wonderful husband found this one at a local bookstore: The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, 3rd edition. Its reading level was right on target for my 7th grader. The illustrations are interesting. And, maps are used extensively. Each era is divided into one or two chapters. We are treating each chapter as a month long unit. Within each chapter, there are about 24 two page sections describing the events in a specific country or a major event involving several countries during that over all time period.

The other main resource is his hundred foot long timeline. Ikea sells craft paper in 98 foot rolls. We taped each end to PVC pipe to make it easier to scroll to the part he’s working on. He then marked off the years with two inches per year (more on this later).

For each chapter/unit, my son starts a new world map. He summarizes what’s going on in each continent from the chapter's introduction.  Every day, he read two of the sections and does the following for each:

·        Adds new places, routes, etc. to his map
·        Adds dates to his master timeline
·        Defines key terms and events
·        Watches any relevant videos

Most of the videos are from YouTube. His favorites are the Crash Course World History series and anything by the folks at Horrible Histories. I also supplement with parts from the History channel’s recent series, Mankind, The Story of All of Us.

The last week of each unit is spent tying everything together. He has a set of specific questions that are based straight off the objectives. He also has a research project due on any related topic. I’ll post details about those parts in upcoming posts.