History & Geography

About this course

Seventh grade keeps the twelve-unit shape of sixth grade but changes what fills it. American history begins with the Age of Exploration and runs through the colonies, the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the Constitution, the early presidents, the War of 1812, Manifest Destiny, and the Oregon Trail, stopping on the eve of the Civil War. World civilizations covers Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, then medieval Europe, Byzantium, the rise of Islam, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Reformation, medieval China and Japan, and the Silk Road. Geography is global this year rather than North American, covering latitude and longitude, scale and legend, landforms, rivers, climate zones, population distribution, biomes, and the physical geography of North America, Europe, and Asia. Civics gives the Bill of Rights two full lessons, adds political parties, the Supreme Court, and a comparison of monarchy, democracy, and republic. Economics is noticeably more grown-up, taking up opportunity cost, market versus command economies, banking and compound interest, budgeting, GDP, entrepreneurship, and stewardship. Culture covers world religions, missions, language families, and the global church, and the current events unit teaches source evaluation, writing news summaries, and a lesson on managing news consumption without becoming anxious or cynical.

The last four units return to citizenship, American history, world civilizations, and geography from a different angle rather than repeating them. Advanced American history carries the story through westward expansion, the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Advanced world civilizations spends whole lessons on the Islamic Golden Age, the Crusades as military conquest, the Renaissance as a shift in how people thought, and the long economic legacy of colonialism. Advanced geography turns to weather and storms, ocean systems, economic geography, and migration.

There are 144 lessons, twelve units of twelve, at about 45 minutes each. A lesson is roughly a thousand words of organized prose under bold subheadings, with primary documents quoted directly, specific numbers, and a short set of review questions at the end, followed by a ten-question multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. The tone assumes a student ready to sit with complicated things. The Declaration is taught as grounding rights in God rather than in government; the Trail of Tears lesson gives the 1,200-mile march and the roughly 4,000 Cherokee dead, quotes Jackson's defiance of the Supreme Court, and calls the broken treaties a moral stain; the colonialism lesson gives the scale of the Atlantic slave trade plainly. None of it is written for shock, but it does not soften what happened either.

What the course covers

• Exploration, the thirteen colonies, and the French and Indian War
• The Revolution, the Constitution, and the early republic
• Westward expansion, Indian removal, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
• Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe
• Islam, the Islamic Golden Age, the Crusades, and Byzantium
• The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Exploration
• Colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and global inequality
• World physical geography, climate, biomes, oceans, and migration
• The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the courts, and political parties
• Opportunity cost, markets, banking, budgeting, GDP, and entrepreneurship

What your student will be able to do

• Trace American history from first settlement through Reconstruction
• Explain what the Declaration claims about the source of human rights
• Weigh the achievements and the costs of an empire or a colonial system
• Use latitude, longitude, scale, and legend to read any world map
• Compare a market economy with a command economy and explain compound interest
• Evaluate a news source and write a clear summary of what it reported

Scope and sequence

All 12 units of History & Geography for Grade 7, 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.