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9th grade · Social Studies · Unit 1 of 16

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.

New York State Learning Standards learning standard: 9.1; 9.1a · the move from Paleolithic hunting and gathering to Neolithic farming and herding

How we explain it

Children can open this short lesson before they practice.

  1. For most of history, people hunted, fished and gathered, moving with the seasons.
  2. About 12,000 years ago, people began farming and domesticating plants and animals: taming and breeding them over generations.
  3. This Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution led to villages, food surpluses, new jobs and the first cities.

Example: What does it mean to domesticate a plant or animal? Wild wheat and wild goats changed slowly with people. People tamed and bred them over generations for their use. Answer: to tame and breed it over generations for human use

First Farmers in New York

In the New York State Learning Standards, this is unit 1 of 16 in 9th grade Social Studies, 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: New York State Education Department (NYSED)

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 learn to control fire
    • 🧍Modern humans (Homo sapiens) appear in Africa
    • 🏙️The first cities grow in Mesopotamia
    • 🪨Early humans make the first stone tools

  2. Question 2

    Which tool helped early farmers break up and turn the soil?

    • the abacus
    • the compass
    • the sundial
    • the plow

  3. Question 3

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

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

  4. Question 4

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

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

    • 🎒carrying only a few belongings
    • 🏺storing surplus grain in clay pots
    • 🧱building permanent mud-brick houses
    • 🫐gathering wild berries, nuts and roots
    • 🐐raising sheep and goats
    • 👣living in small, mobile groups
    • 🧭moving with the seasons to follow food
    • 🏡living in one place all year

  5. Question 5

    What is a surplus?

    🏺
    • Extra food or goods beyond what people need right away
    • A kind of ancient coin
    • A shortage of food
    • A tool for digging soil

  6. Question 6

    What does it mean to 'domesticate' a plant or animal?

    • To tame and breed it over generations for human use
    • To move it to a new continent
    • To hunt it in the wild
    • To draw it on a cave wall

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