History & Geography

About this course

Sixth grade is built in two passes. The first eight units lay the foundation: citizenship and the rights the Constitution protects, colonial America from the thirteen colonies and the Great Awakening through the Revolution and the Bill of Rights, the ancient world from Mesopotamia through Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, China, and the Silk Road to the fall of Rome, the geography of North America including Canada, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, the federal government branch by branch with checks and balances and federalism, economics from scarcity and supply and demand through money, markets, trade, and vocation, culture and Christian missions, and a full unit on media literacy. The last four units are a second, harder pass over the same ground. Advanced citizenship takes up immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, women in American history, Native American history and missions, and religious freedom through Roger Williams and Anabaptist influence on the First Amendment. Advanced American history runs from the causes of the Civil War through Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, both world wars, the Cold War, and the years since 1970. Advanced world civilizations covers the Middle Ages, Byzantium, the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Reformation including the Anabaptists, exploration and colonialism, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. The final unit is world geography, continent by continent.

There are 144 lessons, twelve units of twelve, and the time estimate rises to 45 minutes, a real step up from the earlier grades. A lesson is organized like a set of briefing notes: several short sections under their own headings, key terms in bold, Scripture and primary documents quoted at length rather than paraphrased, and bulleted takeaways. Each lesson ends with a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself.

The writing at this level starts asking your student to weigh things rather than only remember them. The lesson on the Christian view of government lays Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 side by side, then works through Acts 5:29 and the point at which obedience to the state stops. The Crusades lesson calls the sack of Constantinople a moral failure and notes plainly that Saladin treated defeated Crusaders with more mercy than the Crusaders had shown in 1099. The media unit is current, covering algorithms, echo chambers, deepfakes, cherry-picked statistics, and misleading graphs, and it names the platforms it is talking about. Coming in, your student should be comfortable reading several pages of expository nonfiction alone; the four advanced units assume the first eight have been done.

What the course covers

• Citizenship, national symbols, and local and state government
• The colonies, the Great Awakening, the Revolution, and the Bill of Rights
• Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, Persia, India, and China
• North American geography, regions, climate, and resources
• The three branches, checks and balances, and federalism
• Scarcity, supply and demand, money, trade, and economic systems
• Media literacy: bias, sources, social media, and misinformation
• The Civil War through modern America
• The Middle Ages, Crusades, Reformation, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution
• World geography by continent and the biblical Middle East

What your student will be able to do

• Explain what each branch of government does and how they check one another
• Compare ancient civilizations and account for why empires rose and fell
• Distinguish primary from secondary sources and judge a source's credibility
• Spot bias, misleading statistics, and misinformation in a news or social feed
• Argue from Scripture about the duties and the limits of civil obedience
• Locate the major nations, rivers, and trade routes of each continent

Scope and sequence

All 12 units of History & Geography for Grade 6, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 144 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 144 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.