🌎 5th grade Social Studies: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. ☀️Maya, Aztec & Inca

   How the Maya, Aztec (Mexica) and Inca arose, their cities, farming, achievements in mathematics and astronomy, and how the Aztec and Inca empires were defeated by Spain. Maya, Nahua and Quechua peoples are living communities today.

2. 🧭Exploration & Exchange

   The great voyages, the ships and tools that made them possible, mapmaking, the Columbian Exchange and the rise of colonial empires and mercantilism.

3. 🏹First Peoples of the Americas

   How and when the first people came to the Americas, how peoples adapted to the Arctic, plains, deserts, forests and islands, and how shared customs, languages and ways of governing give a group its identity. Native nations such as the Haudenosaunee and Inuit are living communities today.

4. 🗿Civilizations of the Americas

   What makes a civilization (cities, government, job specialization, writing, social classes), city-states and empires, and how the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Inca, Mississippian and Ancestral Puebloan peoples farmed, built and adapted to their land. Maya, Nahua and Quechua peoples live in these lands today.

5. 🧭Explorers & Encounters

   Why European explorers sailed west, where Columbus, Cabot, Cartier, Cabral, Balboa and Hudson went, which lands Spain, Portugal, France, England and the Netherlands colonized, the conquests of Cortés and Pizarro, and the French fur trade with Native nations.

6. 🌽The Columbian Exchange

   The plants, animals, people, ideas and diseases that crossed the Atlantic after 1492, sugar plantations, and the transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage, told factually, with how enslaved Africans resisted and kept their cultures alive.

7. 🗺️Geography of the Americas

   The landforms, bodies of water, climate zones and resources of the Western Hemisphere (the Andes, Rockies, Amazon, Great Lakes and Panama Canal), kinds of maps, and how the land shapes where people live and work.

8. 📍Countries & Capitals

   The regions of the Western Hemisphere (North America, Central America, the Caribbean and South America), which countries are in each, and their capital cities.

9. 🎭Cultures of the Americas

   The languages, holidays, music, sports, art and other contributions of countries across the Western Hemisphere, and what the United States, Canada and Mexico share and do differently.

10. 🏛️Governments of the Americas

    How the governments of the United States, Canada and Mexico are organized, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights, people who struggled for equal rights or self-government, and groups such as the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the Red Cross.

11. 🚢Economies & Trade

    Traditional, market and command economies, needs, wants and scarcity, what countries of the Americas make and sell, imports and exports, and why countries depend on each other through trade.

12. ⏳The Americas Through Time

    Ordering events in the history of the Western Hemisphere, from the founding of Tenochtitlan and Columbus's voyages to independence movements, the Panama Canal and trade agreements.