Where to begin teaching BHP?

Hello, Kerry Lynn  -- I agree, at first glance it can be a lot. A few questions to consider as you begin to plan things out:

• what grade level are you teaching?
• how long will you have these students (full year? semester? something else?)
• what do your state / country standards indicate? 

I love the Teacher Resources and really only "discovered" them in the past year or so (and I've used OER resources for years).  Need a plan -- there are several. Need to see how it connects to the AP , US or AU standards -- that's there too!. 

There's a great network of teachers here, always wanting to share what works, what they've tweaked, etc. 

When do you start school?  Happy new school year!

Meaghan Mihalic Adam Esrig 

Adriane Musacchio 

Brad Vonck 

Thank you for the suggestions, and the link to the Teacher Resources Gwen Duralek . That is very helpful.

Kerry Lynn Like Gwen Duralek said- what is your timeframe?  There is a wide range here in the forum.  Many get to teach the class all school year, others have semesters, and some, me for instance, teach BHP three times a year in trimesters.  Donnetta Elsasser teaches BHP a few days a week over I believe a semester.  So there is a wide range and many teachers who can match you up to a plan of action.  Here is a list of my topics and timeline on a trimester-

Week 1- Introductions, vocabulary activity for the course, course outline, building a personal timeline (understanding thresholds)

Week 2 - Claim testers, understanding claims, writing claims.  Big History initial assessment.

Week 3 - Origin Stories and the Big Bang Threshold 1

Week 4 - Threshold 2 and 3- Stars Light Up and Elements Form

Week 5 - Threshold four, Our Solar System and Earth

Week 6 - Life - Threshold 5

Week 7 - Threshold 6 collective learning and early humans

Week 8 - Threshold 7, Agriculture and Civilization

Week 9 - More Threshold 7, Cultures and World Religions

Week 10 - Little more Threshold 7, Exploration, Expansion and interconnectedness/ Globalization. 

Week 11/12 - Speed of information Threshold 8.

Week 12/13 - The future

Thank you, Bryan Dibble . Wow, teaching the course three times in a school year is impressive!  I teach BHP to freshmen as part of a year-long world history course. I've got a lot of flexibility as long as I cover the standards.

Thanks for the great outline, Bryan Dibble .

It gives a great structure to guide pacing and duration of topics. Then people can fill in with which activities they want based on the frame.

And you are correct that I only see my students a couple of times per week. 

So many good options and adaptations of the curriculum. 

Hi Kerry and welcome.  I also teach BHP to freshmen as a year-long course.  Let me know if you have any general or specific questions.  I'm in New York.  Where are are you located? 

 Todd Nussen , thanks so much for the welcome. I am teaching in Arizona and we begin school next week. What activities do you use to hook students during the first week? I want to get students excited about this new course. The History as a Mystery and History of Me seemed engaging. What do you recommend for starting the year? 

Thank you!

I highly recommend Big History on a Football Field.  It's completely engaging, becomes an excellent reference throughout the year, and it's fun.  Depending on the weather, you can always do a modified version in your school gym or the hallway.  

Take a look at the activity and figure out what works best for you.  In my version, I print out the thresholds on different pieces of paper and then I divide the class into three groups.  Group one is given the task of trying to put the thresholds in order and space them out correctly, then as the next group goes (and the last), I provide a little bit more information and let the group ask me a question.  

 Kerry Lynn (a4bf7597-cf09-4c4b-beab-135f584fd6d5), you are about to embark on an exciting adventure! BHP is a lot of fun to teach. There are so many activities that you can use and high-quality content to make it intedisciplinary. I teach the course over the year to 6th graders, so my biggest challenge is making adjustments to meet them at their level. I'd say that you should not be afraid to spend too much time on unit one since it lays the groundwork of the narrative for the entire course, along with introducing skills, like claim testers, and ideas you circle back to again and again. From there, I'd say you could move more quickly through units 2, 3, 4, and 5 (totally agree with @Bryan Dibble). I have a spin on the History of Me activity that I use each year. I talked about it on this thread before. I also find that the students really enjoy the origin stories. I use this as a group jigsaw so that students get experience with reading, notetaking, creating slides/presentations, and then it culminates with comparison writing.

Kerry Lynn welcome the the excitment of teaching Big History! As other teachers have expressed, it is a lot of fun for our students and for us. I teach a year-long course based on a rotation schedule with four or three classes per week of 60' each. Below there is an overview of the units. In each of them there is a group project and a formative or summative assessment and a lot of hands-on activities. This is the salt of the course. Students love to move, do, touch, and interact with the content so I highly recommend that you explore and choose a couple of activities in each unit. These are some examples of activities for the first units.

 Semester I

• Classes 1-9. Introduction to Big History, Cosmology and Faith, Claim Testers, Origin Story Project. Unit quiz.
• Classes 10-24. Investigation 0. Big Bang, Stars, Chemical Elements, and Planets. Unit test.
• Classes 25- 38. Movie Interstellar. Life on Earth. Extintion Event Project. Unit test.
• Classes 39- 53. Humanity and Collective Learning. Investigation 6. Unit test. Midterm Exam. 

       Semester II

• Classes 1-19. Agriculture & Complex Societies. The origin of world religions. Agricultural societies. Museum Project (Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, Greco-Roman, Persians, Mesoamerican, Inca). Unit test.
• Classes 20-30. Expansion & Interconnection. The Silk Roads, Colecting Learning Part 3. Unit test.
• Classes 31- 54. The Modern Revolution (The Industrial Revolution, Imperialism, Conflict on the Global Stage, Economic Theories, Acceleartion Debate. Unit test. LBHP.
• Classes 55-64. The Future: near, middle, deep. Movie The Martian. Threshold 9 Project. Investigation 9. Midterm Exam.

I wish you great success this year!