Ancient Civilizations (Social Studies):

Please note: Each student must bring their Social Studies spiral notebook to every class meeting. The notebook will be used for reflective writing, note taking, rough drafts, and homework.

We will be covering about 5 million years of human history in less than one year! We will investigate our past through the roles of archaeologists, anthropologists, artists, writers, and historians. Students will also use reading and writing to question and discover global issues that affect our lives through the study of other cultures and their perspectives. Students will also spend time investigating their own history by looking into their own family's ancestry and artifacts.

In the fall, we will be investigating the beginnings of early human civilization and then learn about how society developed in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and among the ancient Hebrews. After the winter break, we will cover Greece, Rome, and India. Finally we will examine life in ancient China. Throughout it all, we will relate what we learn about the past to what we know about the present and what we can hope for the future.

We will also focus on geography as geographic factors certainly relate to how human history unfolds. To enhance critical thinking we will rely on student based inquiry, technology, primary sources, the library, and the History Alive series.Your child will experience intensive reading of
current newspaper articles as well as the Holt textbook, Ancient Civilizations.

I have been fortunate to spend part of my life living in or traveling through most of the areas mentioned above. I will bring artifacts from my travels to further enable student understanding
about life among other cultures.

"History is a series of arguments to be debated, not a body of data to be recorded or a set of facts to be memorized...Who controls history, and how it's written, controls the past, and who controls the the past controls the present."- Robin Winks & Susan Mattern-Parkes, The Ancient Mediterranean World