🌎 8th grade Social Studies

Units

1. Unit 1

   🗽Rights & Amendments

   What the first ten amendments protect, the Reconstruction Amendments, and why rights come with limits and responsibilities.

   Learning standard: 8.C.IR.9; 8.C.DP.11 · rights and responsibilities under the Constitution, and liberty in tension with the common good

2. Unit 2

   ⚔️The Civil War

   How the conflict over slavery led to secession and war, key events and people from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, and how enslaved people helped win their own freedom.

   Learning standard: 8.H.CE.7; 8.H.CE.8 · the conflict over slavery that led to the Civil War, and the war's political and military significance

3. Unit 3

   🗺️Maps, Graphs & Data

   Reading map scales and legends, choropleth maps, scatter graphs and correlation (and why correlation does not prove cause), and what population pyramids say about a country's age and growth. The data in the questions are made up for practice.

   Learning standard: 8.G.GR.1; 8.G.GR.2 · using maps and other representations to show change in population and political geography

4. Unit 4

   📜Sources & Evidence

   Children practice choosing and judging sources, reading artifacts and art, comparing accounts and drawing conclusions from evidence.

   Learning standard: 8.H.CC.4; 8.H.CP.9 · analyzing primary and secondary sources and judging their reliability

5. Unit 5

   📜Founding Ideas

   Ideas the Founders drew from Greece and Rome, the Enlightenment and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, why the Articles of Confederation failed, and the compromises and debates of the Constitution.

   Learning standard: 8.C.PI.1; 8.C.PI.2; 8.C.PI.3 · the influence of Greece, Rome, the Enlightenment and Native American political ideas, and the move from the Articles to the Constitution

6. Unit 6

   🦅The Early Republic

   The first political parties, the Louisiana Purchase, Marbury v. Madison, the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine, Indian Removal and court decisions that expanded or denied rights, 1789 to 1857.

   Learning standard: 8.H.CH.1; 8.C.CE.12; 8.C.PI.5 · political developments of the early republic, the evolution of political parties, and laws and court decisions on rights

7. Unit 7

   🐂Westward Expansion

   Manifest Destiny, the Oregon Trail and Oregon Treaty, the Mexican-American War and Gold Rush, Oregon's exclusion laws, and what expansion meant for Native nations, Mexican Americans and Chinese immigrants.

   Learning standard: 8.G.MM.3; 8.G.GR.2; 8.G.HE.7; 8.C.PI.4 · migration and settlement in US expansion, changing maps, effects on Indigenous peoples, and documents that limited rights in Oregon

8. Unit 8

   ⚙️Industry & Reform

   New technologies and factories, regional economies and slavery, immigration, and the abolition, women's rights and other reform movements before 1861, including resistance to slavery.

   Learning standard: 8.H.CE.5; 8.H.CE.6; 8.H.CC.4; 8.E.ST.9; 8.E.MI.7 · technology and the expansion of slavery, reform movements, resistance to enslavement, regional specialization and technology's effect on labour

9. Unit 9

   ⏳Timeline 1776–1865

   Ordering events from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Civil War, to see how expansion and the conflict over slavery built up over time.

   Learning standard: 8.H.CH.1; 8.H.CE.7 · territorial and political developments of the early republic and the growing tensions over slavery

10. Unit 10

    🏗️Reconstruction

    Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 as a bridge to high school US history: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, Black officeholders, the violence that opposed them and how gains were later rolled back.

    Learning standard: 8.C.CE.13; 8.C.DP.10 · how individuals and movements expanded rights and citizenship for underrepresented groups, and the values in founding documents