Search every subject world, from Preschool to Grade 12. The first five courses of every subject path are free.
16 courses
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders compare urban, suburban and rural communities using Illinois examples, find places on a community map with a compass rose and the four cardinal directions, and learn who makes the rules and laws in families, schools and towns, and why communities need them.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders meet local government: the mayor (or village president) and the council, the services they run and the budget they decide. They see how leaders are elected and how a council makes a decision at a public meeting, and they sort the many ways children and adults can take part in their community.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders see how producers use resources and skills, and how specializing (each worker doing one part) helps a team make more. They follow an Illinois pumpkin from a farm to a family's pie, and they compare barter with money and discover why communities and countries trade with each other.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders classify the three kinds of resources (natural, human and capital), learn that scarcity forces every person and community to choose, name the opportunity cost of a choice (the next-best thing given up), and plan a simple budget for spending and saving.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders explore what changes and what stays the same in communities over time: how people travel, the tools they use and the buildings they live in. They connect causes to effects (a railroad arrives, a highway passes a town by) and use a population chart and a short history of Chicago to describe how a real city grew and rebuilt after the fire of 1871.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders read and build timelines with equal spaces for each ten years, count the years between events, tell primary sources (made at the time by someone who was there) from secondary sources (made later), and question a source: who made it, when, and why.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders learn that people can see the same event or decision differently because of their experiences and needs. They compare perspectives on a town decision, compare two accounts of the same snowstorm, and practise collecting community stories (oral histories) respectfully, noticing how people's views can change over time.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 2
Second graders run a full history investigation about Riverbend, a made-up Illinois river town: they ask a big question and smaller supporting questions, gather evidence from a map, a photo caption, an interview and a population chart, and then make a claim backed by evidence and share it.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders practise the historian's toolkit with Abraham Lincoln's years in Springfield, Illinois: asking compelling and supporting questions, sourcing a real primary source (his 1861 farewell speech), telling evidence from opinion, checking one source against another, and placing events on a timeline to find how many years passed.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders locate Illinois in the United States and North America, name its neighbors and the rivers and lake along its borders, compare its northern, central and southern regions, and use population data to compare urban, suburban and rural Illinois communities and explain how land and water shape where and how people live.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders learn about Cahokia, a great Mississippian city near present-day Collinsville, Illinois; the Native nations of the Illinois country and how they lived with the land through the seasons; how treaties and forced removal in the 1800s took most Native land in Illinois; and the Native nations and Chicago's Native community that continue today.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders use push and pull factors to explain why people moved to Illinois: settlers from the South and East in the early 1800s, immigrants from Europe, Black Southerners in the Great Migration, Mexican families in the early 1900s and newer arrivals from around the world. They read data and family stories to see how migration shaped Illinois communities.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders untangle the many local governments that serve an Illinois community (city or village, county, township, school district and special districts), see how a council makes an ordinance and how it is carried out and judged, follow the money in a local budget, and practise the ways citizens, including young people, take part.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders identify the natural, human and capital resources behind Illinois farms and factories, see how buyers and sellers set prices in a market (pumpkins before and after Halloween), explain why people and places specialize and trade, from Illinois soybeans shipped overseas to bananas shipped in, and weigh benefits, costs and opportunity costs in personal and community choices.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
Third graders study two big changes to Illinois waterways, the Illinois and Michigan Canal (finished 1848) and the reversal of the Chicago River (1900), from several points of view. They compare sources whose authors saw the same event differently, sort changes from continuities, and judge who gained and who lost from a change.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 3
In this project course, third graders investigate how U.S. Route 66, which began in Chicago in 1926 and crossed Illinois through towns like Joliet, Bloomington and Springfield, changed the communities along it. They plan questions, source a set of evidence, weigh evidence for and against a claim, and write and share an evidence-based answer with cited sources.
