SOCIAL STUDIES

From our youngest levels, students will engage with social studies and historical themes as a part of our core curriculum. Students will begin by understanding their place in the world and in their community through different elements of geography and mapmaking, as well as identifying and understand the elements that make up a community.

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Students then move to study ancient cultures by examining given documents of varying forms of media (art, photographs, maps, articles, etc), to understand how humans lived during the given time period. From there, students will learn North and South American history, US history, and then World history in their scope of study. Following our overall school philosophy, students take an active role in their historical meaning-making.

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Students will collaborate to transfer their understanding in a variety of projects throughout the course sequence, as well as practice key skills, such as document analysis, teamwork, collaboration, and discussion and debate. Students will conduct their own research, as well as analyze and evaluate sources, in connection with science and English/Language Arts courses.

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Students will engage with the following overarching questions:

• How does a civilization form?

• How is power gained and lost?

• How do values form and change?

• What patterns repeat in the course of history?

 

In middle and high school, students begin to engage with historical topics and their connection to current events, while continuing to practice foundational skills of document analysis, debate and argument construction, and teamwork and cooperation. Historical instruction is designed to revisit topics to expand and deepen understanding with student maturity through an overarching connection between English instruction and History instruction.​