All Social Studies Units

Explore a menu of Social Studies unit plans from PreK–Grade 8, featuring engaging, standards-aligned lessons that build historical and civic understanding.

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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.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 21 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Reformers and Religious Change

Analyze the causes and consequences of the Reformation—how new ideas, power struggles, and civic ideals transformed religion, politics, and everyday life across Europe.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 20 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Printing Press and Information Revolution

Analyze how printing technologies—from paper and block print to movable type and the press—revolutionized communication, reshaped markets, and shifted power across regions in this 7th-grade world history and economics unit.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 19 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Renaissance—Birth of New Ideas

Explore how Renaissance art, humanism, and global knowledge exchange transformed Europe—linking innovation, civic ideals, and Afro-Eurasian connections that reshaped culture, learning, and society.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 18 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Midyear Synthesis—Global Interactions Museum

Design a classroom “Global Interactions Museum” where students create exhibits that reveal how trade, belief, and innovation connected continents through diffusion, interdependence, and exchange across the medieval world.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 17 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Black Death and Social Change

Examine how the Black Death reshaped populations, labor systems, and belief structures across Afro-Eurasia—tracing its spread through trade networks and its lasting social and economic effects.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 16 (Grade 7 Social Studies): The Crusades and Cultural Exchange

Evaluate the political, economic, and religious motives behind the Crusades and assess their lasting cultural exchanges and consequences across medieval Europe and the Mediterranean.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 15 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Medieval Trade and Urban Growth in Europe

Explain how fairs, guilds, and banking systems transformed medieval Europe’s economy—linking producers, consumers, and credit to the rise of prosperous urban centers.

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Grade 7 Social Studies Units

Unit Plan 14 (Grade 7 Social Studies): Empires of South and Southeast Asia

Describe how India’s empires used resources, ports, and monsoon trade routes to expand influence across the Indian Ocean, linking geography, economy, and political power.