Social Studies

Social Studies

Pre-K: Building a Foundation for Living, Learning, and Working

Together Students are introduced to four major fields of social studies: civics (respecting one another, cooperating, and obeying appropriate rules); geography (understanding connections between places and people); history (recalling experiences); and economics (understanding working, buying, selling and trading things).

Kindergarten: Many Roles in Living, Learning, and Working Together

Students learn about classroom democracy, respect for one another, local geography, roles of people, national, state, and community traditions, and economics in the context of work and money.

Grade 1: Leadership, Cooperation, Unity, and Diversity

Students learn about leadership on many levels, the meaning of citizenship, and map types. They explore how the concepts of unity and diversity, respect for differences, and respect of self shape life in the United States, and how people make choices about purchasing goods and services and saving resources.

Grade 2: Global Geography: Places and Peoples, Cultures and Resources

Students learn about global geography, looking at reasons why people settle in particular places, why they migrate, how they bring culture with them, and how they earn a living, exchange goods and services, and save for the future.

Grade 3: Massachusetts, Home to Many Different People

Students study Massachusetts and New England, beginning with their own city or town. They explore interactions among Native Peoples, European settlers and Africans, and learn about the Massachusetts people who led the American Revolution. The standards introduce students to the founding documents of Massachusetts and United States so that they may begin to discuss and apply ideas about self-government as they help develop codes of classroom rules, rights, and responsibilities. .

Grade 4: North American Geography and Peoples

Students learn about North America (Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and its peoples from a geographic perspective. They learn about ancient civilizations on the continent and early European exploration as they expand map reading, mapmaking, and geographic reasoning skills introduced in grades 2 and 3. They apply concepts of how geography affects human settlement and resource use, and how the westward expansion of the United States created a modern nation of 50 states and 16 territories.

Grade 5: United States History to the Civil War and the Modern Civil Rights Movement

Building on their knowledge of North American geography and peoples, students learn more about the history of the colonies, the American Revolution, the development of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, the early Republic, and the westward expansion of the United States. They study the sectional conflicts over slavery that led to the Civil War and the long struggle in the 19th and 20th centuries for civil rights for all.

Grade 6: Students study the regions of the world by studying the physical geography, nations in the region today, and selected ancient and classical societies before 1000 CE.

Sixth graders will examine how the perspectives of political science, economics, geography, history, and archeology apply to Central America, Caribbean Islands, South America, Oceania, Central and East Asia.