It's time for Era 3 in my classroom, and I have about 14 class days (including an assessment day) to teach this Era (I am using the older Era pacing this year). I always run into the issue of whether to spend about a day on a major ancient civilization or have a PBL where the students explore ONE ancient civilization in huge detail. I have experimented with both and still feel the whole picture is left out no matter where I go.
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How do you choose which ancient civilizations to teach and what key points to focus on for each?
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I echo Donnetta Elsasser comments. I would look at your state standards first. Then, if you teach HS look at the MS standards and/or contact your MS colleagues. Doing that scope and sequence step can really help. I teach HS World History. We did this about 15 years ago and realized that we didn't need to spend much time at all on stuff going to the Fall of the Roman Empire. We cover the highlights from 800BCE up to 600CE in the first quarter. From there, we slow down the rest of the year.
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What would you consider the highlights for those 800 years? That’s where I get into the weeds and find myself hitting 1 civilization a day and creating something a bit reductive in terms of content. That’s where using those historical skills vs content comes in handy for me!
Always curious, if teachers had the freedom, what would they focus on in a brief Ancient History unit?
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I stole the idea of how do empires gain, maintain, and lose power from New Visions curriculum out of NY. That's how I approach it. You could take one or two days for each of those ideas, pull out examples for two or three empires each day, and do it as more of a comparative unit, especially if your students already have background in the topics from middle school.
I do a similar thing with belief systems in APWH because students remember those from middle school. I talk about belief systems reinforcing power, reinforcing social classes, and spreading. It seems to work well as an overview.
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I stole the idea of how do empires gain, maintain, and lose power from New Visions curriculum out of NY. That's how I approach it. You could take one or two days for each of those ideas, pull out examples for two or three empires each day, and do it as more of a comparative unit, especially if your students already have background in the topics from middle school.
I do a similar thing with belief systems in APWH because students remember those from middle school. I talk about belief systems reinforcing power, reinforcing social classes, and spreading. It seems to work well as an overview.
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