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6th grade · Social Studies · Unit 3 of 9

First Farmers

From hunting to farming villages

What your child practices

The long story of early humans, how farming began about 12,000 years ago, domestication, food surpluses, and how settling down led to specialized jobs and the first cities.

Maine Learning Results learning standard: History 1 · early people, and how farming led to settled villages

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. Before farming, people hunted, fished and gathered wild plants.
  2. Order: stone tools, controlling fire, modern humans, cave paintings, then farming (about 10,000 years ago).
  3. Farming led to villages. Maize was first grown in Mesoamerica. Archaeologists study artifacts left behind.

Example: Before farming, how did people get food? They did not plant crops. They found food in the wild. Answer: by hunting, fishing and gathering

First Farmers in Maine

In the Maine Learning Results, this is unit 3 of 9 in 6th grade Social Studies, after Time & Evidence and before Where Civilizations Grew.

Gradelings describes a child's practice on this unit as Beginning, Approaching, Meeting or Exceeding (Four practice steps). That reflects practice, not a report-card mark: the teacher decides the mark.

Source: Maine Department of Education

Sample questions

A taste of this unit. In the app, questions change every time and get easier or harder to match your child.

  1. Question 1

    Put these events from the human story in order, earliest first.

    • 🪨Early humans make the first stone tools
    • 🌾People begin farming in Southwest Asia
    • 🔥Early humans learn to control fire
    • 🏙️The first cities grow in Mesopotamia

  2. Question 2

    Historians use the word 'civilization' for a society with…

    • only a few families living together
    • cities, a government, specialized jobs and often writing
    • no farming of any kind
    • people who move every season

  3. Question 3

    Early hunter-gatherers or a farming village? Sort each way of life.

    Sort into: 🦌 early hunter-gatherers · 🌾 farming village

    • 👣living in small, mobile groups
    • 🏡living in one place all year
    • 🧭moving with the seasons to follow food
    • 🧱building permanent mud-brick houses
    • 🏺storing surplus grain in clay pots
    • 🫐gathering wild berries, nuts and roots
    • 🐗hunting wild animals
    • 🌱planting and harvesting crops

  4. Question 4

    What was the Fertile Crescent?

    • A curve of rich farmland in Southwest Asia, from Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean
    • A desert in northern Africa
    • A mountain range in China
    • An island in the Pacific Ocean

  5. Question 5

    Before farming began, how did people get their food?

    🦌
    • By buying it at markets
    • By trading with cities
    • By growing wheat in large fields
    • By hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants

  6. Question 6

    Which crop was one of the first to be farmed in Southwest Asia's Fertile Crescent?

    🌾
    • cacao
    • wheat
    • maize (corn)
    • potatoes

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