Seventh grade students will review the tools and mental constructs used by historians and geographers. They will develop an understanding of Ancient World History, Eras 1 – 4. Geography, civics/government, and economics content is integrated throughout the year. As a capstone, the students will conduct investigations about past and present global issues. Using significant content knowledge, research, and inquiry, they will analyze the issue and propose a plan for the future. As part of the inquiry, they compose civic, persuasive essays using reasoned arguments.

Ultimately, why something happened in the past is the question that history is all about. And here’s the fun part (or the hard part!). It’s up to you to answer the why question. You will read about many things that happened in the past and some reasons why people think they happened. People who look at the same facts sometimes come to different conclusions. Answering the other “W” questions will help you answer the question, why: Why did this happen? Answering Why -- that’s what thinking like a historian is about.

Before we can begin to study the first peoples, it is important to establish the concept of time. Historians use timelines to help aid in the understanding of the time frame in which the topic under study has taken place. The first step is to establish how the past is organized into sections of time. The organization of time into Eras is a choice made by historians. The sections of time that are being used in this book are divided by major turning points (big events that change humans forever) in history. This book is organizing the major Eras into the following four categories: Prehistory, Ancient History, Middle Ages, and Modern History.

Location, location, location. You may have heard this phrase before. It is used by realtors to explain that the most important thing in selling a house is its location. With the civilizations you are about to study, location might be the most important thing that determined the success of those civilizations.

What is an empire? How did they grow? What did they do? How did they work? Why do they decline and fall? These are some of the questions that historians have studied and tried to figure out for centuries. In this chapter you will learn about the difference between a civilization and an empire, the characteristics of empires, the impact of geography on civilizations and empires, how trade developed, and how empires were governed. Finally you will look at some examples of empires from this age.

In this chapter you will learn about religion. What is religion? Simply put, religion is the belief in a god or set of gods. Unfortunately, the study of religion is not simply put. Religion is very complex; it is one of the most interesting parts of human existence. Religion is a belief in a god or set of gods and so much more. It is part of a cultural system that includes practice, world views, ethics, and a social organization that connects humans to each other and to a source of existence. A religious belief system is also a way of explaining the mysteries of life.

War, poverty, environmental disasters, lack of resources, the struggle for power, and the quest for freedom and rights have been the common threads throughout history. These issues are still the core of the modern world’s agenda in hopes of improving the lives of all humans. In this unit you are going to identify a significant issue that is still plaguing the world today, research the issue, write a persuasive essay that presents your solution to the problem you investigated, and, finally create a campaign to put your solution into action. Basically, you are going to witness what a positive difference you can make in the world!

The 6th grade MI Open Book Geography Text explores the five themes of geography, first by providing an introduction to the study of geography itself, then focusing in on a theme each chapter while studying a region of the world. The final chapters explore the themes in action in other regions.

Quite simply, “Geography” broken down means “to study the earth” and throughout your studies in the book, we are going to expand on this definition. If you were to go home and ask your parents about geography they may have studied in school, they might say when they were students they memorized the states and capitals, or major countries in the world. This is only one part of what geography really is however. To study geography is to study where we are in the world; what the world around us is like. It is the study of who lives there and why.

The landmass of North America lies in the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic to the north, the continent of South America and the Caribbean Sea to the south, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The land is rich in resources like coal, natural gas, oil, timber products, freshwater, and an abundance of plant and animal species. Renewable resources such as wind, water, biomass, geothermal and solar are widely used as well.

The area known as Latin America is made up of the region south of the United States, beginning at the river that separates the U.S. from Mexico, the Rio Grande’, and extending to the southern tip of South America, an area known as Cape Horn.

The region of North Africa and the Middle East lies at the continental crossroads of Asia, Africa and Europe. At this intersection of the world, all three continents meet here at the Mediterranean Sea. The region extends from the eastern border of Pakistan to the Atlantic coast of Morocco in the west. The region includes many diverse landscapes. It contains rugged mountains, vast deserts, spacious plains and is surrounded by numerous seas. In this unit, you will learn how geography impacts the way people live. You will also discover how culture impacts a person’s perspective.

In the introduction to this book you learned briefly about the five themes of geography, and previous chapters have covered the geographic themes of Movement (North America), Human/ Environment Interaction (Latin America), and Location (North Africa and the Middle East). This chapter will help you begin to think more about the theme of “place.” Geographers define the study of place as the conditions at a location, or more simply, a study of what it’s like there. If you look back at the chapters on North America, Latin America, and North Africa and the Middle East you’ll notice in the sections on physical geography that this question has really been answered.

Over seven billion (7,000,000,000) people live on planet Earth. South Asia has over 1,000,000,000 people alone. Geographers determine regions of the world differently, usually based on characteristics that an area shares, such as language, climate, religion or economic similarities. For our purposes, South Asia includes: India, Nepal,

Russia, with over 6.6 million square miles of varied climate and landscape, is the largest country in the world. It is nearly twice the size of the United States or Canada. Covering almost one-eighth of the Earth’s surface, it ranges from the Arctic Circle in the north, to the borders of China in the south, from Europe in the west to the Pacific Ocean to the east. It spreads through two continents and 11 time zones. The Ural Mountains, some of the oldest mountain ranges, stretch from the north to the south. Russia borders more countries than any other and has 12 major seas.

Oceania is an area of the world that has some very unique characteristics. More than one third of the earth’s surface is comprised of the Pacific Ocean and Oceania . In addition to all those islands, Oceania also includes the smallest continent in terms of land size: Australia. You can look anywhere in Oceania and find strong cultural traditions, rich history, and strong geographic features that vary widely depending on where you go.

In the first six chapters of this book you studied a theme of geography and how it related to the region under study. In the last two chapters of this book you studied multiple themes and how they related to the regions. In this final chapter of the book you will put all five themes into practice by studying the most populous of the continents - Asia. More specifically, you will study the themes in practice in East Asia, which includes large countries in terms of land mass and population such as China and Mongolia, as well as smaller nations such as North and South Korea and Japan.