Dr. Michael Kester-Haynes

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 10 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Life Along the Rivers

Explain why early civilizations formed along major rivers by showing how flood cycles, fertile soils, and irrigation supported surplus farming, specialization, trade, and the rise of early cities.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 9 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Midyear Project—World Map Gallery

Create an annotated world map showcasing early migration routes, using coordinates, scale, and geographic evidence to explain how landforms and physical systems shaped human movement and settlement.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 8 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Early Communities and Trade

Explore how surplus production sparked specialization, barter, early money, and cooperative systems—revealing how trade, standards, and recordkeeping linked producers and consumers in emerging economies.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 7 (Grade 6 Social Studies): The Dawn of Agriculture

Agriculture and domestication reshaped early human societies—creating surplus, specialization, settlements, and new trade-offs in power, labor, health, and environment.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 6 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Adapting to Environments

Explore how early humans adapted shelters, tools, and clothing to diverse environments while tracing how technologies spread across regions and how different groups experienced these innovations.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 5 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Early Humans and Migration

Trace early human migrations using fossil, map, and DNA evidence while exploring how climate, landforms, and resources shaped movement, routes, and early settlement across regions.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 4 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Movement and Cultural Diffusion

Explore how ideas, goods, and technologies travel across regions through trade networks, why key ports and corridors thrive, and how interdependence creates both opportunities and risks for connected societies.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 3 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Climate, Land, and People

Explore how climate zones, landforms, and physical systems shape settlement, agriculture, trade, hazards, and human adaptations, helping Grade 6 students analyze regions through clear, evidence-based geography.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 2 (Grade 6 Social Studies): Mapping Our Planet

Explore how latitude/longitude, rivers, monsoons, deserts, and tectonic forces shape human settlement, agriculture, trade, and hazards as students integrate maps, graphs, and texts to explain powerful geo–culture connections.

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Grade 6 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 1 (Grade 6 Social Studies): The World Around Us

Build foundational geography skills with an engaging week on global regions, hemispheres, latitude/longitude, and essential map tools—helping Grade 6 students locate places accurately, estimate distances with scale, and justify regional groupings through clear, evidence-based mapping.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 36 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Cumulative Synthesis & Exhibition

Showcase your mastery at the Global Fair with trade-route maps, Enlightenment posters, and inquiry essays that connect geography, economy, and civic ideals—highlighting how ideas, goods, and power shaped our interconnected world.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 35 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Debating Empire and Exchange

Hold a formal academic debate on whether exploration brought more benefits or harms, using trade-network evidence and multiple sources to weigh interdependence, impacts, and propose an informed, actionable conclusion.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 34 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Global Citizenship and Power Today

Connect historic civic ideals—justice, rule of law, liberty, equality—to modern global issues and human rights as students engage in evidence-based discourse, compare systems, and design feasible informed actions for change.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 33 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Resistance and Cultural Blending

Explore how enslaved and colonized peoples preserved identity through resistance, adaptation, and cultural blending—creating new languages, religions, arts, and traditions that reshaped global culture under empire.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 32 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Economic Systems and Interdependence

Compare mercantilism, capitalism, and early market economies—examining scarcity, opportunity cost, and exchange systems—to understand how trade, credit, and innovation built global interdependence and economic change.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 31 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Global Empires and Colonization

Analyze European expansion from 1500–1700—comparing colonial rule, trade networks, and global interdependence—to uncover how empires, economies, and cultures transformed through exchange, labor, and conflict.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 30 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Indigenous Civilizations of the Americas

Explore how geography shaped Aztec, Maya, and Inca civilizations—their governments, economies, and cultures—and analyze how each adapted, allied, or resisted during European contact through diverse historical sources.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 29 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Columbian Exchange

Evaluate how the Columbian Exchange reshaped global ecology and economy—tracing the movement of crops, animals, pathogens, and people that transformed environments, labor systems, and interdependent markets after 1492.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 28 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Age of Exploration

Map major explorers’ routes and uncover how motives, technologies, and encounters reshaped global trade, environments, and societies—revealing the lasting consequences of early modern exploration across continents.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 27 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Midyear Project—Ideas That Changed the World

Create a digital exhibit tracing how one transformative idea—law, liberty, science, or art—evolved across regions and centuries, showing its causes, continuities, and global impact on justice, rights, and human progress.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 26 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Civic Ideals Across Civilizations

Compare how Confucian, Islamic, and Enlightenment traditions define justice, equality, and authority—revealing shared ideals and tensions that shaped global understandings of legitimacy, power, and the common good across history.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 25 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Enlightenment—Ideas of Liberty and Law

Study how Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Beccaria transformed ideas about natural rights, consent, separation of powers, toleration, and the rule of law—reshaping politics and inspiring revolutions worldwide.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 24 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Scientific Revolution—Observation and Reason

Explore how observation, experimentation, and reasoning ignited the Scientific Revolution—transforming astronomy, physics, and medicine while reshaping ideas about truth, authority, and civic life in early modern Europe.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 23 (Grade 7 Social Studies): African Kingdoms of Trade and Power

Explore how West and East African kingdoms like Ghana, Mali, Songhai, and the Swahili city-states rose through trade, resources, and leadership—revealing how geography, power, and culture shaped everyday life across Africa.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 22 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Empires of Faith—Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals

Compare how the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires expanded through trade, art, governance, and tolerance—revealing how power, culture, and diversity shaped everyday life across Afro-Eurasia.