The first History and Social Science unit of Grade 5 examines the fascinating history of our nation in the centuries before it was a nation. Students investigate the unique and blended world that was created in North America by the collisions and interactions of European, Indigenous, and African peoples, with a focus on the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. This framing of early American history is an important one to establish for students at the start of the year an inclusive understanding of their nation’s diverse roots and origins. Understanding what matters to people about places and ways of life, and how beliefs, ideas and experiences shape their actions – these historical questions are at the heart of Unit 1 as students ask:
How do lands and places matter to people?
What happens when communities interact and why?
How do beliefs and values shape people’s decisions? How do beliefs and values sustain groups and help them survive?
These are also important questions for 5th grade students with their growing sense of place in the world, and their own responsibilities and choices.
As the introductory unit of the 5th grade social studies curriculum, a main purpose is to introduce students to the practice of “thinking like a historian” using evidence from centuries past. Students will practice distinguishing primary from secondary sources, and engage with a wide variety of source types, including paintings and drawings, historical maps, artifacts, material culture and written texts. They will practice asking questions that historians pose about sources to help them understand the past. These lessons will also introduce students, in a grade-appropriate way, to the difficult realities of exploitation and injustice – an important foundation for civic understanding in the grades that follow.
Combining Topic 2 (Reasons for revolution, the Revolutionary War, and the formation of government) and Topic 3 (Principles of United States Government) of the Massachusetts History/Social Science Framework, the second unit of Grade 5 examines the process by which the 13 North American colonies of Great Britain became the United States of America and established a government for the new nation. While Unit 1 was a sweeping look at North America across multiple centuries, Unit 2 has a different scope and chronological focus: the eventful decades from the start of the French and Indian War through the crafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Yet crucial threads of the story introduced in Unit 1 are equally central here, including the tension between slavery and freedom and struggles over land and sovereignty. Throughout the unit, students consider perspectives on individual freedoms and rights as they compare the actions taken by diverse groups and people to promote and protect their interests in colonial America.
This unit centers on two practice standards. In Clusters 1 and 2, students focus on Practice Standard 4 — identifying a point of view in a source and explaining its origins. In doing so, they consider different perspectives, an important feature in building civic discourse. Cluster 3 focuses on Practice Standard 1 — civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions — and provides students with a foundational understanding of the era’s key ideas, debates, and decisions. Just as importantly, it helps students to see that democracy requires participation, reflection, negotiation, and choice as we continue to work on creating a “more perfect union.”
Building on Unit 2, where students examined the process by which the 13 North American colonies of Great Britain became the United States of America and established a new national government, Unit 3 focuses on the choices and challenges of the United States in its first half-century as an independent nation. Here, crucial threads of the story from Units 1 and 2 remain central, including the tension between slavery and freedom and the struggles over land and sovereignty of Indigenous nations. As students study the growth of the nation’s territory and economy, they encounter the tension between America’s declared values and economic interests and analyze how the growth of the nation benefited some while harming others. This framing is important to highlight for students, as it establishes the foundational understanding that the Early Republic was home to great opportunity and promise for some but oppression and injustice for others. By exploring these difficult topics, students prepare to study the Civil War and its outcomes in the final unit of fifth grade.
The final unit of 5th grade examines slavery, the legacy of the Civil War, and the struggle for civil rights for all. In Unit 4, students continue the work of Units 1-3 by probing the links and tensions among ideas about liberty, justice, and equality. These shaped the founding of the nation, its expansion westward, and its descent into civil war, and they remain central in the collective civic life of the nation today. In the first half of the unit, students investigate how the issue of slavery continued to divide the nation and was the primary cause of the Civil War. They also consider how the Union’s victory provided a fulcrum for change and the expansion of civil rights to African Americans. Here, students explore the nation’s “new birth of freedom” by engaging with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the promise of Reconstruction.
In the second part of the unit, students grapple with the backlash ushered in by the Jim Crow era and the failure of the federal government to secure and protect civil rights for all. The unit ends with a cluster of lessons dedicated to the 20th century African American Civil Rights Movement and the ways it served as a model for civil rights movements of other groups. The themes of activism and agency, which have been at the heart of this year-long study of United States history, remain central to Unit 4. Since students will study world history and geography in the 6th and 7th grades before returning to the study of the United States and Massachusetts government and civic life in the 8th grade, the work they do in this unit provides an important foundation for the work to come.