Search every subject world, from Preschool to Grade 12. The first five courses of every subject path are free.
140 courses
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Children talk about who they are and what they like, notice that friends are alike in some ways and different in others, and find the groups they belong to, such as a family and a class. The course ends with simple ways to help a new friend feel welcome.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Children meet several fictional families of different sizes and shapes and learn that every one of them is a family. They practice ways family members care for each other and share a special family way, such as a meal, a game or a bedtime story.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Children practice three ways of getting along in a group: taking turns one at a time, sharing so that everyone gets the same, and helping with small jobs. Olly models each idea with a playground or snack scene before children try it.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Children meet community helpers such as firefighters, doctors, mail carriers, farmers and teachers, match them to the tools they use and the places they work, and learn a simple safety plan: when you are lost or hurt, find a safe grown-up, and in an emergency a grown-up calls 911.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Children use the words first, next and last to put a day in order, decide what happens before and after in everyday routines, and notice that people and plants change as time passes: a baby grows into a child, and a seed grows into a flower.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Preschool
Olly's class plans a small garden together. Children see how a group decides by voting and counting, how giving everyone a job lets the whole group help, and how working together gets a big job done. A take-home activity plants a seed in a cup.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Children describe themselves, notice that classmates are alike and different in many ways, and then step out into the community: the library, the park, the store and other shared places. They finish by finding places on a simple picture map of Olly's neighborhood.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Children sort needs (things we must have to live and be safe) from wants (things that are nice to have), discover that we cannot have everything so we choose, and see how people use and save money to get what they need. A pretend store brings it all together at home.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Children learn that rules keep us safe and help everyone be treated fairly, match rules to the places where they are used (classroom, street, playground, library), and practise what to do after a rule is broken: say sorry, help fix it and try again.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Children look at jobs in three places: classroom jobs that keep a room running, community workers who make things or help people, and big jobs that go faster when the work is shared. They sort workers who make things from workers who help people, an early step toward goods and services.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Children use the words past (long ago) and present (today), compare how people lit their homes, wrote, talked and traveled long ago with how we do it now, and discover two ways to learn about the past: asking older people and looking closely at old objects and photos.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Pre-K
Olly's class notices litter in their neighborhood park and plans a clean-up. Children practise the steps of a simple community action: notice a problem, share ideas and vote, do the plan safely with grown-ups, and check how it helped. They also sort litter into recycling and trash.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners build an 'identity puzzle' of the many parts that make them who they are, discover that each person belongs to several groups at once, and practise noticing how classmates are alike and different with respect and curiosity.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners test rules for fairness (does the rule treat everyone the same way and help the group?), learn that a responsibility is a job others count on you to do, and help a class make and change a rule by sharing ideas and voting.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners connect community helpers to the services they give everyone (fire safety, health care, mail, libraries, trash pickup), learn who the people in authority are at school and in the community and how they keep us safe, and find service buildings on a picture map using position words.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners decide why needs come before wants when money or time is limited, discover the natural resources that everyday things come from (trees, animals, water, soil), and learn that because resources are limited, people make choices and take care not to waste them.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners put events in order with first, next, last and yesterday, today, tomorrow, learn the seven days of the week on a calendar, and compare going to school long ago in a one-room schoolhouse with going to school today, noticing what changed and what stayed the same.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners become history detectives. They learn that old objects (artifacts) and pictures are clues about how people lived, practise asking who, what, when, where and how questions about a clue, and compare an old picture and a new picture of the same street to find what changed and what stayed the same.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Kindergartners meet five fictional families and the traditions they celebrate, learn how traditions are passed down from grandparents to children, discover that all people share the same basic needs even when they meet them in different ways, and practise respectful, curious responses to traditions that are new to them.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Kindergarten
Room 5 at the fictional Willow School wants more new books to read. Kindergartners follow the class from noticing the problem, to listening to everyone's ideas and voting, to asking the principal for permission and running a Book Swap Box with a job for everyone, and finally checking whether the plan worked.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders look at the roles people play in groups (leader, member, helper), the responsibilities that come with each role, and the qualities of a good citizen: honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and caring. Short stories from a fictional school give practice choosing actions that show those qualities.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders tell rules (made by families, schools and groups) from laws (made by governments for everyone in a place), match rules and laws to their purposes, compare fair ways to make a group decision (taking turns, voting, drawing names, agreeing) and count tally marks to find which choice won a vote.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders learn which services a community provides for everyone (libraries, parks, fire protection, roads, trash pickup) and that people pay for them together through taxes, trace how many workers and volunteers depend on each other to get one job done, and read a map key to find community services on a symbol map.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders tell goods (things you can touch) from services (work done for someone), see that producers make goods and provide services while consumers buy and use them, and learn why money makes trading easier, how people earn it, and how they choose between spending and saving for needs and wants.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders build a timeline of a life, learn four kinds of sources that tell us about the past (photographs, objects, documents and oral histories), and use evidence from a grandparent's letter to compare school in 1965 with school today.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders learn that culture is a group's way of life (language, food, clothing, celebrations, stories and art), read an original fable to find the lesson a traditional story teaches, and see how families keep some traditions and add new ones when they move to a new place.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
First graders investigate the past of Maple Creek, a made-up Illinois town. They ask who, what, when, where, why and how questions, find the maker, date and place of local sources such as an old newspaper notice and a photo, and put the town's events on a timeline to see how it changed.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 1
Room 1 at the fictional Cedar Street School worries that cars drive too fast past the school crosswalk. First graders follow the class as they gather information by counting and asking, weigh the benefits and costs of three ideas, vote, write a polite letter to the town's leaders and check what happened.
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.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders learn the tools for studying Illinois history: dating systems (BCE and CE), decades and centuries, building a timeline to scale from Cahokia to statehood in 1818, judging how useful a source is for a question (including a real 1787 primary source), and handling sources that disagree, such as the different dates given for Jean Baptiste Point du Sable's settlement at Chicago.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders trace the Illinois Country from the arrival of French explorers and missionaries among the Illinois Confederacy, through French colonial villages (where both free and enslaved people lived), British rule and the American Revolution, to statehood in 1818 and the moves of the capital from Kaskaskia to Vandalia to Springfield, considering how each change looked to different peoples.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders sort which jobs belong to local, state and national government, learn the three branches of Illinois government under the 1970 Illinois Constitution, follow a bill through the General Assembly to the governor (including the veto and override), and explore what citizenship means and how citizens of any age can take part in state government.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders compare traditional, command, market and mixed economies; calculate profit and see how prices, profit and competition guide sellers; read Adam Smith's famous 1776 pin-factory example of specialization and connect training (human capital) to productivity and income; and map the main parts of the Illinois economy, from farms to factories to the Chicago transportation hub.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders follow the land of Illinois: how Native homelands became surveyed squares of land for sale, how the steel plow, drainage and the railroads turned tallgrass prairie into farms and new towns, how Illinois shifted from farms to cities and suburbs, and how people today weigh farming, building and protecting the last pieces of prairie.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders read the First Amendment and connect rights to responsibilities, then study how rights were denied and won in Illinois: the struggle over slavery and the state's Black Laws, the 1837 killing of newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy, the campaign that repealed the Black Laws in 1865, and the women's suffrage victories of 1913 and 1919. They compare perspectives at each step and identify the tools citizens use to change society.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
Fourth graders explore how Illinois shaped the United States: the 1858 Lincoln–Douglas debates and Lincoln's 'House Divided' speech, Illinois's role in the Civil War, Chicago as the crossroads of the nation's railroads and trade (and the 1894 Pullman Strike that stopped them), and how Illinois is represented in the national government today, including presidents with Illinois ties.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 4
In this capstone project, fourth graders investigate a real Illinois question: why did Chicago grow from a small town in 1840 into the largest city in the Midwest by 1890? They plan the inquiry, analyze census data comparing Chicago and St. Louis, a 1914 poem by Carl Sandburg and summaries of the canal, railroads and the 1871 fire, then write and present an argument with a claim, cited evidence and a counterclaim.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders sharpen the historian's toolkit with real primary sources from early America: Benjamin Franklin's 1754 'Join, or Die' cartoon, Thomas Paine's 1776 'The American Crisis', and two conflicting accounts of the 1770 Boston Massacre. They ask inquiry questions, source and contextualize documents, detect point of view and loaded language, and corroborate evidence to judge reliability.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders explore the diversity of Indigenous North America before 1492: how environments from the Arctic to the Southwest shaped homes, food and work; how nations governed themselves, including the Haudenosaunee Confederacy; the agricultural knowledge (maize, the Three Sisters, irrigation) and trade networks that connected the continent; and how historians use archaeology and oral tradition while avoiding stereotypes.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders examine why Spain, France, the Netherlands and England explored and colonized North America and where they settled; trace the Columbian Exchange of plants, animals and diseases; compare the economies of the New England, Middle and Southern colonies; and compare how colonization was experienced by Native nations, enslaved Africans, indentured servants, women and free colonists.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders trace the chain of causes from the French and Indian War to the Declaration of Independence, follow the major turning points of the Revolutionary War from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris, close-read the Declaration's big ideas and grievances, and compare how Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved and free Black Americans, Native nations and women experienced the Revolution.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders learn why the first national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak, how delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention reached compromises (including the Great Compromise and the Three-Fifths Compromise), how the Constitution's principles (popular sovereignty, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism) limit power, and how the debate over ratification led to the Bill of Rights.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders follow the young United States from George Washington's first term and the first peaceful transfer of power, through the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expedition (and the Native nations who made it possible), to the growth of the nation's territory by 1848, and they weigh its consequences: new land for settlers, fierce debates over slavery's spread, and forced removal of Native nations such as the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
Fifth graders connect money, rights and action: how Britain's trade rules and colonial boycotts used economic pressure, how incentives and costs shape choices, how governments pay for public goods with taxes, how rights expanded through amendments won by citizens' movements from the 13th to the 26th Amendment, and how people today can use the same civic tools to work for change.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 5
In this capstone, fifth graders investigate a compelling question: was the American Revolution revolutionary for everyone? They read Abigail and John Adams's 1776 letters, study the 1777 freedom petition led by Prince Hall, and examine the experiences of Native nations, Loyalists and Black Loyalists, then write an evidence-based argument that weighs multiple perspectives and answers a counterclaim.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners find out how we know anything about the distant past. They sort primary and secondary sources, read the layers of a dig to put finds in order, use radiocarbon half-lives to estimate ages, separate what an artifact shows from what we infer about it, and finish by writing a claim backed by evidence and an honest statement of its limits.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners follow modern humans from Africa across the world, then investigate how and where people began to farm, not once but in several places. They weigh the gains and costs of farming using skeletons, seeds and settlements as evidence, and finish by arguing about a real puzzle: a huge stone monument built before farming took hold.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners locate the first river-valley civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and China and explain how floods, silt and irrigation made cities possible. They identify the institutions that held these societies together, read short excerpts of Hammurabi's laws as a primary source, and write a comparison of two civilizations backed by evidence.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners sail the ancient Mediterranean: Phoenician traders spread an alphabet, Athens invents a democracy that most of its people could not join, Sparta builds a military state, and Rome grows from a republic into an empire. Along the way they source a famous speech reported by Thucydides and judge how far it can be trusted.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners study how Chinese rulers claimed the right to rule and how the Qin and Han unified a vast land, compare Confucian, Daoist and Legalist answers to the question of how to keep order, and meet the Maurya and Gupta empires of India. They finish on the Silk Roads, tracing how goods, beliefs and technologies moved across Asia.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
Learners investigate Kush and Aksum in northeast Africa, the Nok culture and the Bantu expansion, and the Olmec, Maya, Chavín and Ancestral Puebloan societies of the Americas. They compare societies with a clear framework and ask a deeper question: how does the kind of evidence that survives shape what we can know?
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
This course steps back from single civilizations to look at four big themes across the ancient world: how people were governed and why rulers claimed the right to rule, what major belief systems taught, how economies moved from barter to coins, and how trade linked distant peoples. Learners finish by testing a big claim against evidence from several societies.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 6
In this capstone, learners carry out a complete comparative inquiry: they choose a strong comparison question, source a small set of primary documents and artifacts, build a thesis with evidence and counterevidence, and write and revise an argument comparing two ancient civilizations.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Using the Black Death of 1347–1351 as a case study, learners judge sources for reliability and usefulness, separate long-term causes from triggers, trace intended and unintended consequences, and build a causal argument that ranks causes with evidence.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Learners connect four medieval worlds: the manors and Church of western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic caliphates and Tang–Song China. They trace how law, learning, printing and gunpowder moved between them, examine the Crusades as conflict and exchange, and argue whether the printing press caused the Reformation.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Learners follow gold and salt across the Sahara to the empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, ride the monsoon winds to the Swahili coast, Great Zimbabwe and the fleets of Zheng He, and study how the Aztec and Inca organized huge states. They compare these networks and source the outsiders' and insiders' accounts that describe them.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Learners examine why Europeans sailed into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans after 1400, what the Columbian Exchange moved between hemispheres, how small Spanish forces toppled the Aztec and Inca states with Indigenous allies and epidemics, and how the Atlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans across the ocean. Every lesson includes the perspectives of those who were colonized and enslaved.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Learners compare two answers to an old question, where does a ruler's power come from? They examine divine-right absolutism under Louis XIV, the long English struggle to limit kings from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights, and the Enlightenment ideas of Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau. They read short public-domain excerpts, trace the ideas into the Declaration of Independence, and debate who was left out.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Learners study four kinds of revolution: a revolution in how people investigated nature, political revolutions in North America, France, Haiti and Latin America, and the early Industrial Revolution in Britain. They compare causes and outcomes, ask who gained rights and who did not, and read data about a changing economy.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
Between 1790 and 1850 the United States doubled its territory, built canals and mills, and grew rich on cotton. Learners study these developments through the eyes of different people: settlers and merchants, enslaved people, Cherokee and other Native nations forced from their homelands, young women in the Lowell mills, Irish immigrants and the women who met at Seneca Falls. They then argue whether 'progress' is the right word for the period.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 7
In this project course, learners design and complete a comparative history investigation of two revolutions or two trade networks from the year. They refine a research question, take notes responsibly (quoting, paraphrasing and citing), corroborate evidence across several sources, build a comparative causal thesis, and write and reflect on a full project essay.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Every financial decision starts with limited resources and competing goals. Through fictional teenagers' choices, learners distinguish needs from wants, write SMART goals and calculate the saving needed to reach them, measure opportunity costs in money and time, think at the margin, and learn to ignore sunk costs. The elective uses fictional people and numbers and never gives personal financial advice.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
What happened on King Street in Boston on the night of 5 March 1770? Learners investigate the Boston Massacre through an engraving, a British officer's account and trial testimony. They practice sourcing, contextualization, close reading and corroboration, separate perspective from bias and propaganda, and write their own carefully corroborated account.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
How does work turn into income, and income into take-home pay? With fictional workers, learners compare hourly, salary and other pay, calculate overtime under the federal rule, convert salaries to hourly rates, trace gross pay to net pay through payroll taxes and a fictional withholding table, apply a fictional progressive tax table (marginal versus average rates), and weigh career choices using human capital and total compensation. No real tax filing advice is given.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Learners investigate why the first US government under the Articles of Confederation struggled, how delegates in 1787 built a new Constitution through hard compromises (including compromises over slavery), and how the Constitution divides power among three branches and between the nation and the states. They read the Preamble, the Tenth Amendment and Federalist No. 51, and weigh the ratification debate.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Learners trace how each new territory reopened the question of slavery, from the Missouri Compromise to Dred Scott, study the resistance of enslaved people and abolitionists, read the seceding states' own explanations, and follow the Civil War's turning points, including emancipation and the service of Black soldiers.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
A budget is a plan for money before it is spent. Using fictional young adults, learners build a monthly budget from net income, separate fixed from variable expenses, follow cash flow through the month to catch shortfalls, plan for irregular income and emergencies, test one common rule of thumb (50/30/20) and its limits, and adjust a budget when circumstances change.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
After the Civil War, the nation rewrote its Constitution to abolish slavery and promise citizenship, equal protection and the vote to Black men. Learners read the Reconstruction amendments closely, see how freedpeople built schools, churches and political power, trace how violence and court decisions rolled those gains back into Jim Crow, and examine who else was included in or excluded from citizenship: Chinese immigrants, Native Americans and women.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Why does starting early matter, and why can money sitting still lose value? Learners calculate simple interest (I = Prt) and compound growth (A = P(1 + r/n)^nt), estimate doubling time with the rule of 72, compare short and long time horizons, measure inflation's effect on purchasing power, approximate real returns, and learn how deposit insurance protects bank and credit union deposits. All accounts and rates are fictional, and no products are recommended.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Borrowing lets people buy now and pay later, at a price. With fictional loans and cards, learners calculate interest and total cost, see why paying only a small fixed amount on a credit card can take years, follow how loan payments split between interest and principal, compare offers by APR and total cost, learn the factor categories behind credit reports and scores, and recognize red flags of high-cost and predatory lending. No lenders or products are recommended.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Between the Civil War and 1920, railroads, steel and oil made the United States the world's largest industrial economy, millions of immigrants and Black Southerners moved to booming cities, workers organized and struck, and reformers fought to fix the problems industry created. Learners analyze data, sources and the debates of the era and judge what Progressive reform achieved and whom it left out.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Smart buying and staying safe from scams. Learners compare unit prices, recognize marketing tactics designed to speed up spending, calculate the yearly cost of subscriptions, read key contract terms, and learn the common patterns of scams (phishing, impostors, advance-fee and prize scams) and their red flags: pressure, secrecy and unusual payment methods. They practise a safe response: stop, verify through official channels, tell a trusted adult, and report.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
From the Spanish–American War of 1898 to the end of the Cold War, the United States became a world power. Learners examine debates over overseas empire, why the US entered two world wars, life and injustice on the home front, the decision to use atomic bombs from several perspectives, and the strategy of containment that shaped the Cold War.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Life involves risks: accidents, illness, lost property and investments that fall in value. Learners calculate expected loss, compare strategies for managing risk (avoid, reduce, keep, transfer), see how insurance pools risk, work out costs under a fictional health plan (premium, deductible, copay, coinsurance and out-of-pocket maximum), and explore why diversification and time horizon matter when investing. Everything is fictional and conceptual; no insurance or investment advice is given.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Learners study how the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s used courts, nonviolent protest and voter registration to dismantle legal segregation, and how courts, Congress, presidents and states responded. They meet the farm workers', women's and disability rights movements, then learn a careful, non-partisan method for analyzing a civic issue using a fictional town's decision.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
The elective's capstone. Learners work through a fictional household's year: Carmen and her brother Luis share an apartment and must balance their budget, build an emergency fund, decide how to finance a used car, and choose between two health plans. They calculate each piece, state their assumptions, weigh trade-offs, and write a recommendation memo that presents options fairly. Everything is fictional; nothing is personal financial advice.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 8
Learners carry out a full inquiry from compelling question to informed action. They build supporting questions, gather and evaluate sources from the year's courses and beyond, develop claims and counterclaims, write an evidence-based argument, and design a lawful, realistic civic action plan, without being told which side to take.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
Before studying world history to 1500, learners examine how we know about the distant past at all. They trace how ancient texts survived through copying and translation, test Herodotus's famous numbers for the Persian invasion against logistics and other evidence, search the record for the voices of workers, women and the enslaved, and evaluate period labels such as 'the Middle Ages' as arguments rather than facts.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
Learners examine the two-way relationship between early societies and their environments. They evaluate competing explanations for where farming and states arose, analyze reconstructed data on irrigation and soil salt in Mesopotamia, read climate 'proxy' evidence, and weigh multicausal theories of crisis such as the Late Bronze Age collapse, ending with an argument that avoids both environmental determinism and ignoring the environment.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
How do a few rulers govern millions of people across huge distances? Learners build a 'toolkit of empire' (administration, law, infrastructure, armies, legitimacy, revenue and cultural policy) and use it to compare Achaemenid Persia, Rome, Han China, the Maurya, the Inca and Mali. They source an emperor's own account of his achievements and argue why some empires lasted longer than others.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
Learners study the origins, core teachings and spread of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the intellectual traditions of Greek philosophy and medieval Islamic, Indian and Chinese scholarship. They read short public-domain texts, examine how traditions adapted as they spread, and compare ethical teachings across traditions, always describing beliefs accurately and respectfully.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
Learners analyze Afro-Eurasian exchange from about 600 to 1450 CE as a system of connected networks. They compare the Silk Roads, Indian Ocean, trans-Saharan and Mediterranean networks, trace the diffusion of paper, gunpowder, crops and numerals, treat the Black Death as a network event, and evaluate the famous travel accounts of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta before arguing how 'connected' this world really was.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
Learners analyze three great conflicts of 1000–1500: the Mongol conquests and the empire they built, the Crusades seen from Latin, Byzantine, Muslim and Jewish perspectives, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. They use the concepts of change and continuity to judge what conflict destroyed, what it preserved and what new connections it created.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
The same events looked very different depending on who described them. Learners study positionality, compare four accounts of the Mongol conquests (a Persian official in Mongol service, an Arab historian, the Mongols' own Secret History and a European friar), weigh oral tradition against written accounts in the story of Sundiata and Mali, and build a multi-perspective account that names the voices still missing.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 9
In this research course, learners design and carry out an investigation on a world history topic before 1500. They refine a researchable question, search for and evaluate scholarship, write annotated bibliography entries, map how historians have interpreted the topic, build a thesis and outline, and write a cited research essay with counterargument.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Learners open the study of the modern world (about 1450 to the present) with three big tools: arguing about when 'modern' begins, judging historical significance with explicit criteria, and reading distinctly modern sources such as statistics, photographs and propaganda. They practice shifting between local, regional and global scales and write an argument about the significance of a modern development.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Between 1450 and 1750, ocean routes linked every inhabited continent. Learners analyze the demographic and ecological effects of the Columbian Exchange, use data to study the scale and organization of the Atlantic slave trade and its effects in Africa, follow American silver to China, and examine the joint-stock companies and mercantilist policies that organized this first global economy, before judging who gained and who lost.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Learners compare the 'age of revolutions' (about 1688–1826) across Britain, North America, France, Haiti and Spanish America. They connect Enlightenment ideas to political change, classify structural, ideological and immediate causes, closely read declarations of rights and the people they left out, and judge how far each revolution achieved its own stated goals.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Learners evaluate competing explanations for why industrialization began in Britain, analyze how factories, railways and cities transformed work, families and environments, compare the responses of liberals, socialists, unions and reformers using short public-domain texts, and trace industrialization's spread to Germany, the United States and Meiji Japan and its global effects.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
In the 1800s industrial powers built vast empires in Africa and Asia. Learners analyze the motives, technologies and racist ideologies behind the 'New Imperialism', trace conquest from the Opium Wars to the Berlin Conference, study the many forms of resistance and adaptation (from Adwa to the Meiji state), and evaluate nationalism as both a liberating and an exclusionary force.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Learners analyze the long and short causes of World War I and the nature of total war, evaluate the peace settlements and the interwar crises (revolution in Russia, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and Nazism) using primary sources and election data, study the global scope of World War II and the Holocaust with care, and examine the institutions built afterward to prevent another catastrophe.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
Between 1945 and the 1990s, most colonized peoples won independence. Learners analyze why empires ended, compare negotiated, nonviolent and armed paths to independence (India, Ghana, Vietnam, Algeria, Kenya), examine Cold War pressures, non-alignment and the end of apartheid, and evaluate decolonization's lasting legacies in borders, economies, migration and institutions.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 10
In this capstone, learners design and carry out a comparison of two modern cases from different regions (for example, Britain and Meiji Japan's industrialization, or India's and Algeria's paths to independence). They choose cases deliberately, build a comparison matrix, use quantitative evidence responsibly, write a comparative causal thesis that accounts for counterexamples, and produce a cited investigation.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes. Learners see how it became a science, turn everyday questions into testable ones, write hypotheses with operational definitions, distinguish theories from hypotheses and falsifiable from unfalsifiable claims, recognize how intuition and hindsight bias mislead us, and explain one behavior (teenagers' late sleep timing) at biological, psychological and social-cultural levels. The elective is about research literacy, not diagnosis or therapy.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners open the year of US history by practicing the core moves of historical thinking on one big question: how did American attitudes toward foreign alliances and world power change from Washington to NATO? They source documents with the HIPP method, trace continuity and change over time, debate turning points and periodization, and write an evidence-based argument.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners begin US history long before 1607, with the diverse societies of Native North America. They compare Spanish, French, Dutch and English colonial projects, analyze encounters through Indigenous diplomacy, alliances and resistance (from the Powhatan Confederacy to the Pueblo Revolt and Metacom's War), and trace how English colonies moved from indentured servitude to hereditary, race-based slavery.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
How do psychologists gather trustworthy evidence, and how do they protect the people they study? Learners compare case studies, naturalistic observation and surveys (including sampling), interpret correlations without assuming causation, design experiments with independent and dependent variables, random assignment, control groups, placebos and double-blind procedures, and judge validity and reliability. They then study research ethics: informed consent, protection from harm, confidentiality, deception and debriefing, ethics review boards, the Belmont Report's principles, and the historical cases that made these rules necessary.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
How does the brain produce behavior, and how do we know? Learners trace how neurons communicate (action potentials and neurotransmitters), map the nervous system and major brain structures, and examine the evidence behind brain claims: famous case studies (Phineas Gage and Henry Molaison) and how retellings changed them, EEG and fMRI and their limits (including the multiple-comparisons problem), plasticity, and heritability as a population statistic. Throughout, they ask how all models simplify. No medical or clinical content is included.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners analyze the imperial crisis that turned British subjects into revolutionaries, the hard choices the war forced on Patriots, Loyalists, enslaved people and Native nations, the great debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution, and the bitter conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson that produced the first political parties and, in 1800, a peaceful transfer of power.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners analyze how cotton and the market revolution bound North and South together while expanding slavery, examine Manifest Destiny and the Mexican–American War from US and Mexican perspectives, trace how the question of slavery in the territories destroyed political compromise between 1846 and 1860, and evaluate the causes of secession using the words of participants.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Our senses collect information, but our brains construct what we experience and think. Learners study transduction, thresholds and Weber's law; bottom-up and top-down processing, grouping principles and illusions; selective attention, inattentional blindness and change blindness; and the mental shortcuts (availability, anchoring, representativeness) and confirmation bias that shape judgment. They connect classic studies to everyday reasoning and to evaluating evidence.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
How do we learn from experience, and why do memories fade or change? Learners analyze classical conditioning (Pavlov), operant conditioning (reinforcement, punishment and schedules), and observational learning (Bandura), then study memory as encoding, storage and retrieval: working memory, the forgetting curve (Ebbinghaus), the testing effect and spacing (Roediger and Karpicke), and the reconstructive nature of memory shown by Loftus and Palmer's 'smashed' versus 'hit' study. Examples are everyday and nonclinical.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners trace how a war to preserve the Union became a war that destroyed slavery, through the actions of enslaved people, soldiers, Congress and Lincoln. They read Lincoln's own words on the war's meaning, analyze the political struggles, achievements and violent overthrow of Reconstruction, and compare how historians from the Dunning School to W. E. B. Du Bois and later scholars have interpreted the era.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
How do people develop, and how do other people shape what we do? Learners compare Piaget's stage theory and its critiques with Vygotsky's social view of learning, examine attachment research (Harlow's monkey studies and their ethics, Ainsworth's Strange Situation) and Erikson's psychosocial stages, then study social influence: Asch's conformity experiments, variations of Milgram's obedience studies, and the bystander effect, including how the story of Kitty Genovese was later corrected. They close by asking how culture and 'WEIRD' samples limit what psychology knows. The course describes research; it does not classify learners.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
From the 1870s to 1920, conflict among corporations, workers and farmers reshaped American politics. Learners analyze the Gilded Age economy and its battles, the 'new immigration' and nativist backlash, the Populist challenge and the Progressive reforms that expanded the federal government's role, and the struggle for women's suffrage, while evaluating who gained from reform and who was left out.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners analyze key US decisions for war from 1917 to 1964, the recurring tension between national security and civil liberties (from the Espionage Act to Japanese American incarceration and McCarthyism), how historians have argued about the atomic bomb and the origins of the Cold War, and competing explanations for why the Cold War ended.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Psychology attracts popular myths and eye-catching headlines. Learners test common claims (the '10% of the brain' myth, matching teaching to 'learning styles', 'left-brained' and 'right-brained' personalities) against evidence, study the replication crisis and the reforms it prompted (preregistration, larger samples, open data), calculate and interpret effect sizes, and build a checklist for judging media reports of psychological studies.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
The psychology elective's capstone. Learners design (but do not run) a study on a harmless, nonclinical question, write a hypothesis with operational definitions, choose an experimental design, complete an ethics review checklist, analyze a provided fictional dataset (means, difference and effect size), identify limits, and write a plain-language summary. The model question asks whether a short end-of-class quiz improves vocabulary recall compared with rereading. No mental-health topics and no questionnaires about learners are involved.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners analyze how the Black freedom struggle combined a long legal campaign with mass direct action and voter registration to win the landmark laws of 1964 and 1965, examine the strategic debates within the movement, and trace how women, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, people with disabilities and LGBTQ Americans adapted its strategies. The focus is on historical strategies, institutions and evidence, not on present-day policy positions.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Learners examine how economic crises and new technologies reshaped American institutions: competing explanations of the Great Depression, the New Deal and its critics, postwar federal programs and research that built the highway, suburban and computer age, deindustrialization and the 2008 financial crisis. They read economic data closely and compare how institutions responded to crises eighty years apart.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
How can historians write about events that are still within living memory? Learners examine why sources for the recent past emerge slowly, how memory differs from history, how oral historians gather testimony ethically, and how born-digital sources change research. They apply these methods to the end of the Cold War, the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, and the digital revolution, analyzing evidence and perspectives without taking sides on current policy debates.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
Historians argue with one another, and their interpretations change. Learners study historiography through two classic American debates, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and Charles Beard's economic interpretation of the Constitution, and the historians who challenged them. They learn to dissect a secondary argument (thesis, evidence, citations, scope), evaluate how well evidence supports a claim, and compare two interpretations of the same event.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 11
The capstone of Grade 11. Learners design and carry out an independent investigation of a US history question: they write a proposal, search archives and digitized collections using period vocabulary, build an annotated bibliography, position a thesis among historians' interpretations, outline with counterarguments, and write a cited investigation that acknowledges its limits. A worked model on the Chicago Defender and the Great Migration shows each stage.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Learners study the principles built into the US Constitution (popular sovereignty, limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, rule of law and judicial review) through the text of Articles I–III, V and VI, Federalist No. 51 and Marbury v. Madison. They calculate the supermajorities the Constitution requires and evaluate how its institutions divide and limit power.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Learners distinguish civil liberties from civil rights, trace how the Bill of Rights came to limit the states through incorporation, and analyze landmark Supreme Court cases on speech, the press and criminal justice (Schenck, Brandenburg, Tinker, New York Times v. United States, Gideon, Miranda and Mapp). They apply the Court's tests to fictional scenarios and consider the responsibilities that accompany rights, such as jury service and informed voting.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Where does government power come from, and how does it become policy? Learners classify enumerated, implied, reserved and concurrent powers, read McCulloch v. Maryland and trace the commerce clause from Gibbons v. Ogden to United States v. Lopez. They follow a bill through Congress and a regulation through notice-and-comment rulemaking, map the policy cycle and the roles of interest groups, and analyze a fictional policy proposal by its stakeholders, evidence and trade-offs without taking sides.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Citizens need reliable information to govern themselves. Learners distinguish news, opinion, analysis and advertising; practise lateral reading with the SIFT moves; interpret polls using sample size and margin of error; examine how recommendation algorithms shape what people see; recognize common patterns of misinformation; and study press freedom and responsibility, including New York Times v. Sullivan. All examples are fictional and politically neutral.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Learners use the core tools of microeconomics on fictional markets: scarcity, opportunity cost and the production possibilities frontier; marginal benefit and marginal cost; supply, demand and equilibrium (plotted on a graph); shifts versus movements along a curve; price elasticity; price ceilings and floors; and externalities with the policy tools used to address them. Policy questions are analyzed by their trade-offs, not settled for the learner.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
How do we measure a whole economy, and what can government do when it falters? Learners calculate GDP by the expenditure approach, convert nominal to real values, compute per-capita output, unemployment, labor force participation and CPI inflation from fictional data, and trace the business cycle. They compare fiscal and monetary policy tools and the arguments of several schools of economic thought, without being told which school is right.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
How do governments raise and spend money, and how do nations trade? Using fictional tax tables and countries, learners calculate taxes under progressive, proportional and regressive systems, distinguish marginal from average rates, separate deficits from debt, and examine the main categories of federal spending. They then calculate comparative advantage, analyze who gains and loses from a tariff, convert currencies and interpret trade balances, presenting the trade-offs that lead people to different policy views.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
How do citizens work on shared problems in their own communities? Using the fictional town of Millbrook, learners identify which level of government decides an issue, map stakeholders by interest and influence, separate positions from underlying interests, practise the norms of deliberation, follow how public comment works at local meetings, and evaluate action plans that use lawful, respectful forms of participation. The course teaches methods, not which side to take.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Learners compare how countries organize power and economies: democratic and authoritarian regimes; presidential (United States), parliamentary (United Kingdom) and semi-presidential (France) systems; unitary, federal and confederal structures; plurality, proportional and mixed electoral systems (Germany); and market, command and mixed economies. They calculate how electoral rules turn votes into seats and analyze the trade-offs each design makes, rather than ranking systems.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
Public debates are full of arguments built on evidence of uneven quality. Learners dissect arguments with the Toulmin model, identify common fallacies, distinguish causal from correlational evidence, judge study quality, catch misleading statistics (relative versus absolute risk, percent versus percentage points, truncated graphs), and practise steelmanning. They apply these tools to a fictional city's debate over speed cameras near schools, where three studies disagree.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
A compact survey of the financial documents and decisions young adults meet first. With fictional people and numbers, learners read a pay stub, interpret a loan disclosure (APR, finance charge, total of payments), check lease and contract terms, compare warranties and return policies, calculate total cost of ownership and use present value to compare offers that pay at different times. The Personal Finance and Economics elective covers these topics in more depth.
History, Civics & Social Studies · Grade 12
The Grade 12 capstone. Learners choose a civic or economic question, design an evidence and data plan using public sources, analyze options against explicit criteria (effectiveness, cost, equity, feasibility, legality), and write a policy memo that presents trade-offs, counterarguments and limits. A fictional model on a city's library hours shows each stage. Learners may recommend an option or present a decision framework; no position is prescribed.
