United States History 4th Hour

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Course Description: Students are required to take one year of history.  They may take either U.S. History or Dual Credit U.S. History.  Big ideas serve as frameworks for investigating essential questions in history. Students are allowed to take issue with the idea and discover for themselves whether it is true.  Illinois history will be incorporated into both classes.  Several days each quarter students will study local southern Illinois history, though it may not fit neatly into one of the big idea schemes.  Also, both history classes, as part of the intro unit to history, will learn why we study history, how history is NOT synonymous with the past, usage of metaphors in history, and begin developing important history skills for “doing” history-corroboration, sourcing, close reading and contextualization.  These skills will be learned by analyzing/comparing/contrasting primary and secondary sources, finding text connections, and doing “think a-louds.”  Students will demonstrate their skills throughout the year by writing, debating, and discussing “big ideas”, as well as creating various history projects incorporating various types of technology. The typical test will consist of IDs (identifications in which students answer who, when, where, what happened, significance),  or essay questions in which students write an essay making an argument, and use primary/secondary sources as evidence to support that argument.

There will be some overarching Big Ideas concepts that are continually reflected upon throughout the year, and will help to connect the different units.  Those concepts are benefits, persuasion, perspective, identity, power, consequences, and unity.

The purpose of designing a curriculum like this is to help students become historians themselves.  They in turn will learn how to analyze various media and in turn strengthen their media literacy skills.  They also will learn how to critically think about events from various perspectives and demonstrate evidence of this through their writing, and by these means they will come to grasp important topics in American History.  The stress will be to learn this material, not merely memorize simply facts and dates.  The teacher will use differentiated instruction centered around developmental ideologies when teaching with special emphasis on constructivism,   Students will be using all levels of Bloom’s revised taxonomy to learn the material in conjunction with Gardner’s various multiple intelligences.  This curriculum was created using the backward design approach.   

Below are some websites created by US history students for history fair for your viewing:

1. https://site.nhd.org/65570489/home

2. https://site.nhd.org/75381950/home

3. https://site.nhd.org/99563082/home