Skills are refined through making pen and ink drawings, watercolor paintings, and sculptures focusing on proportion, value, and scale. Translating words into pictures and pictures into words is investigated through depicting setting, combining shapes for meaning, using color for mood and responding to art. Students also create prints and then explain the printmaking procedure in writing.

When young people want to find out more about a topic or question, they often turn to Google. But open Internet searches routinely turn up contradictory results that mix fact with falsehood. Making sense of search results is even more challenging with politically loaded topics. This task asks students to perform an open search about a controversial figure in order to assess their ability to wade through information to find sources, evidence, and arguments that they trust.

Much of Assyria's history is closely tied to its southern neighbor, Babylonia. The two Mesopotamian empires spoke similar languages and worshipped most of the same gods. They were often rivals on the battlefield for influence in the ancient Middle East.

In Athenian democracy, every citizen was required to participate or suffer punishment. This practice stands in stark contrast to modern democratic governments in which citizens can choose whether or not they wish to participate. In Athenian democracy, all citizens pulled their weight.

Students will practice looking at a topic from multiple points of view, and will discuss whose voices are amplified and whose voices are silenced. This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website called "Who Am I Online?".

We may be leaving out information or disregarding it because it doesn't conform with our own beliefs.  Students will learn about confirmation bias, different perspectives and how to avoid confirmation bias.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?". 

Huitzilopochtl, God of the Sun, was the Aztec principal god. He had an insatiable appetite for blood. Under his urging, the Aztecs rose from a band of primitive farmers to become the bloodiest civilization of the early Americas. Many Central America cultures indulged in human sacrifice. The Aztec practiced it on an industrial scale, sacrificing tens of thousands of victims each year.

This curriculum unit of three lessons examines the social, political and economic conditions of the southern states in the aftermath of the Civil War and shows how these factors helped to shape the Reconstruction debate as well as the subsequent history of American race relations.

Like many great civilizations, Benin's rise to power was filled with excitement and wonder, but its eventual social crises and political instability displayed the effects of greed, inhumanity, and love of power.

This section discusses the rise and spread of Buddhism and the history of its founder, Siddhartha.

The Maya were a collection of people clustered in city-states. What united them was an idea. For the Maya the world of ordinary living and the Otherworld populated by gods, ancestors, and monstrous things, were equally real. There existed three regions, intricately bound together: the heavens, the earth, and the waters of the Underworld.

This lesson focuses on the identification of major boundaries, borders, and barriers around the world.

The students are introduced to the research process through an assignment (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aV1canXyzEv0imNlA3VgYuAqXqJV4ax7xv0opIt4mtQ/edit?usp=sharing) that requires them to perform research on an individual who has had to overcome challenges and has benefitted others (eg. Jackie Robinson)

I want to work towards making them more savvy researchers as well as more digitally literate. I envision this lesson as part of a focus on conducting quality research. Another lesson, probably prior to this, would be on identifying credible sources of research. A follow-up lesson could easily be on performing effective web searches in research.

On the night of June 16, 1775, a detail of American troops acting under orders from Artemas Ward moved out of their camp, carrying picks, shovels, and guns. They entrenched themselves on a rise located on Charleston Peninsula overlooking Boston. Their destination: Bunker Hill.

If a Hindu person were asked to explain the nature of the caste system, he or she might start to tell the story of Brahma the four-headed, four-handed deity worshipped as the creator of the universe.

At the same time that Shays' Rebellion attempted to force the government to take a new course of action in response to hard times, another group of Americans gathered to consider a very different vision for the future of the republic. The group was especially concerned about economic policy and the way that competing state policies often worked at cross-purposes. Responding to such concerns, the Virginia legislature called for a convention to meet in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1786 to discuss commercial matters. Only twelve delegates came from five states, but they agreed to meet again the next year in Philadelphia.

In the 1500s, when Spanish conquistadors appeared, two vast empires, those of the Aztecs and the Incas, dominated Central and South America. Both possessed divine kings, both were fractured by internal dissent, and both quickly succumbed to the Spanish onslaught. The physical remains of all these cultures lay dormant for centuries, until science and curiosity demanded their exploration.

The traditional religions of Great Britain's North American colonies had difficulty maintaining their holds over the growing population. This did not, however, result in a wholesale decline in religiosity among Americans.  In fact, the most significant religious development of 18th century America took place along the frontier, in the form of the Great Awakening. This curriculum unit will, through the use of primary documents, introduce students to the First Great Awakening, as well as to the ways in which religious-based arguments were used both in support of and against the American Revolution.

For this lesson, students will learn through a video and powerpoint presentation how to cite in-text in APA format. Students will have an opportunity to practice citing in-text before citing in their own APA research paper.