Transition from BIG HISTORY to WHP-Origins- Has anyone made this switch?

Selah High School has offered BHP for freshman for five years, and now we are switching it up to World History Origins. We think it might be a better fit for our freshmen in a trimester system. We only have 11 or 12 weeks to give the students as much history as possible. It's our "introduction to social studies" class, and we know kids in our district have very little social studies prior to 9th grade. I'm not even going to start crying about that fact. Has anyone out there made the transition from Big History to Origins? Or anyone teach both? What are the best crossover activities? I see the comparisons on paper between both classes, but we don't have time to teach it all. What are the "must-dos" for Origins?

0 Donnetta Elsasser 7 months ago

Great question, Bryan Dibble . I have looked into doing this a few times, but I always stay put.

I will tag some others whom I think have more experience with the switch.

John Vidoli , Hajra Saeed ,Adriane Musacchio

Denise Ford
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0 Bryan Dibble 6 months ago in reply to Donnetta Elsasser

Our issues was time. It's hard to do any curriculum justice in just 12 weeks, but my team all out voted me on the science part. I liked learning about EVERYTHING in our past, but the team wanted to start and end with humans. I get it. And besides, what OER curriculum isn't good? We have so much at our fingertips.
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0 Donnetta Elsasser 6 months ago in reply to Bryan Dibble

I can totally relate to having to condense material for time constrictions!

Why not just start with Threshold 6 and move forward?
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0 John Vidoli 6 months ago

Time is the issue, isn't it?

I don't teach Origins any longer, but it was a challenge to create a meaningful narrative for 10th graders.

I'm facing a similar challenge teaching 1750 to 9th graders. One change I'm making to my planning for next year is to focus on a theme. This might be easier for 1750 than it would be for Origins.

At the end of this past school year, when we were in the Decolonization/Cold War unit, I noticed how often I was speaking of rights. This focus on rights would provide a nice throughline through the course.

1750 has a Course Problem (How have we and our human communities converged and integrated to be so similar yet remain fragmented and so different?) that might be useful in creating a throughline for Origins.

I'm curious to see what you come up with.
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0 Donnetta Elsasser 6 months ago in reply to John Vidoli

Thanks, John Vidoli . I like the idea of a theme or through-line.

That made me think back to one year I did ancient civs with MS. We sort of accidentally made up a theme of "controlling trade". It worked pretty well as an anchor point which naturally branched out into other topic areas.
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0 John Vidoli 6 months ago in reply to Donnetta Elsasser

Donnetta Elsasser, that sounds interesting.I found something similar as I plan my units for next year. Placing the creation and expansion of rights pulls in other frames.

I'm using the 4QM process to redesign my units. (Thanks Todd Nussen for posting about this.
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0 Chris Scaturo 5 months ago

I was forced to switch 3 years ago. Origins is a neat class but it lacks the oomph that BHP has. It's not it's fault, it's just not the new shiny toy BHP was. I focused on the same skills (multiple causality, claim testing, Goldilocks' Conditions, etc) just changed the narrative.
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