Grade 6 Social Studies Rhode Island standards Standards

Grade 6 - Ancient to Medieval World History and Geography

Content Standards

Economics

Geography

History

Civics and Government

Anchor Standards

Identify what political power is and who has political power in a society.

Explain how political power is and has been obtained and used to govern communities and individuals with attention to their intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Analyze the purpose of government and the use of power, including balancing order and freedom, to advance and control different communities and individuals based on their intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Argue how power can be distributed and used to create a more equitable society for communities and individuals based on their intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Identify what rules and laws are, and who has the power to make them, in different settings and cultures that are familiar and unfamiliar to students.

Explain why rules and laws exist, and how they are implemented by and for individuals and communities based on their intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Analyze how rules and laws positively and/or negatively impact different individuals and communities based on their intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Argue how rules and laws can be used to create an equitable society.

Identify what rights and responsibilities individuals and communities have in a society and who can take advantage of them.

Explain different ways communities and individuals inform themselves, exercise their rights and responsibilities, and engage formally and/or informally in political processes.

Analyze how individuals and communities have been included or excluded from the political process based on their intersectional identities and lived experiences and the impact these actions have had on their rights, responsibilities, and the functioning of a democratic society.

Argue for a possible solution to make rights equitable and the roles of those involved in pursuing that solution.

Identify the ways that different political systems utilize economic systems to organize and distribute goods and services to individuals and communities.

Explain how those traditionally privileged and marginalized across intersecting identities can influence and interact with economic systems.

Analyze how inequities within the economic system have been addressed or sustained by the actions of those traditionally privileged and marginalized.

Argue how different economic systems can create more equitable outcomes for individuals and communities, particularly for those traditionally marginalized from the economic system.

Identify the individuals and communities involved in the production of any good or service, the materials needed for producing them, where and how the materials are obtained, and the various interrelationships among all of these elements.

Explain who has the power to make decisions related to the means of production and the effects those decisions have on individuals and communities

Analyze how individuals and communities acting through intersectional identities and lived experiences can affect the means of production.

Argue whether the costs and benefits of an aspect of the means of production equitably serve all individuals and communities.

Identify the choices communities make about how to use resources based on the scarcity of that resource, including those that are familiar and unfamiliar.

Explain how scarcity affects the cost and availability of desired goods and services, and who has the power to influence the factors related to cost and availability and why.

Analyze how decisions affecting access to goods and services are influenced by systems of power and cultural norms including how these effects of decisions create more equitable or inequitable outcomes.

Argue how a resource can be used differently to create a more equitable outcome for individuals and communities including how individuals and communities can influence systems of power to achieve that change.

Identify the characteristics of human systems, physical systems, and the environment, and ways they interact at local, regional and/or global levels.

Explain how humans and their societies and institutions affect, modify and/or preserve the environment, as well as how the modifications of the physical environment affect physical, behavioral, and diverse cultural systems.

Analyze how individuals and societies at local, regional and/or global levels influence political, economic, and social decision-making.

Argue how decisions about resources and the environment made by individuals and/or communities impact current and future peoples differently and how those decisions might be made more equitable.

Identify maps, globes, and other geographic tools and technologies that are used to describe where places are located both absolutely and relatively across time, space, and distance.

Explain how the characteristics and elements of maps, globes, geographic tools, and other technologies are used and selected to identify and describe local, regional and/or global locations.

Analyze multiple types of maps, charts, and graphs and how they are used to interpret topographical information, draw inferences about the development of societies, and determine how places shape events and how places may be changed by events.

Argue how the systematic analysis of the spatial patterns provides an integral understanding of a place or region and supports equitable decisions about climate and land use.

Identify historical events that are culturally relevant to global, national, and local histories and connect to students' intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Explain multiple causes and effects of historical events, centering and representing the voices and experiences of individuals and communities who were agents of change and resistance.

Analyze multiple sources to compare and contrast historical events through the lenses of identity, power, and resistance.

Argue how social change, intersectional identities, and lived experiences are crucial to the study and practice of history.

Identify key people, central ideas, and the mechanisms by which stories are told and retold regarding an event or series of events, centering the voices of historical actors and groups engaged in resistance and change.

Explain the purpose, audience, and perspective of multiple types of sources (art, music, oral histories, pamphlets, film, texts, etc.) relating to a historical event or series of events, individual, or group of people, including indications of bias toward or against the subject portrayed.

Analyze multiple types of sources, including art, music, oral histories, pamphlets, film, texts, etc., through a critical reflection of the creators' and students' intersectional identities and lived experiences.

Argue, using multiple narratives rooted in identity, power, and resistance, how history itself is an interpretation of events.

Identify the characteristics of populations based on their size, place, region, and cultural demographics, as well as identifying patterns of migration.

Explain how and why a population's characteristics, including their spatial distribution, growth, and movement, have divided, organized, and unified areas of Earth's surface and impacted both human and physical systems.

Analyze how human systems and the distribution of populations interact with and impact physical systems, and how conflict and access to resources influence physical systems.

Argue how the relationship between populations and physical systems influence decision-making about the equitable access to resources and land at the local, regional, and/or global levels.

Identify peoples, events, technologies, and ideas involved in historical and social change in various geographical and temporal locations.

Explain how historical and social change have been and continue to be accomplished in relation to systems of power, identity, and resistance.

Analyze historical change through the intersectional identities and lived experiences of people who have accomplished social change throughout history in relation to systems of power, identity, and resistance.

Argue how all individuals can act as local, national, and/or global agents of social change by using lessons learned from history.

Analyze the jobs and necessary skills of people who study the past.

Explain ways geographers study the Earth, its land, features, and inhabitants to understand the relationship between humans and planet earth, and identify the tools that they use

Explain ways archeologists study the physical evidence left behind by humans to understand human culture, and identify the tools that they use

Explain ways anthropologists work with people today to learn about their cultures and histories

Explain the approaches historians use to analyze and interpret the past using primary and secondary sources, and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of those approaches

Analyze similarities and differences in the ways that geographers, archeologists, anthropologists, and historians work to identify primary sources and artifacts, analyze evidence, and construct interpretations of the past

Analyze the sources scholars use to study the past.

Identify types of primary sources, and analyze ways that scholars use them to study the past

Identify types of secondary sources, and analyze ways that scholars use them to study the past

Analyze the importance of using oral traditions when studying history

Analyze the challenges in using primary and secondary sources (e.g., contextualization, corroboration, bias)

Explain the scale of time from today back to early humans.

Identify ways to express the scale of time (e.g., decade, age, era, century, millennium, BCE, CE) and explain why times periods are named differently in different contexts

Identify terms for historical periods (e.g., Paleolithic Era, Neolithic Era, Before Common Era, Common Era) and the time we are living in now

Identify linear and comparative timelines, and explain how to read and use them

Analyze the development of early humans and the characteristics of early human societies.

Identify major geographical features around the world (e.g., climate zones, bodies of water, mountains, deserts)

Explain environmental changes that shaped the earth, and analyze how they allowed for the growth and development of human life

Identify significant archeological sites and their locations, the techniques used to obtain those findings, and analyze the types of evidence found of human ancestors and their evolution

Analyze the reasons human groups moved around the globe and identify the locations of those movements

Explain the differences between Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens

Explain reasons that human ancestor lines transformed and replaced other hominid lines

Identify the characteristics of early Homo sapiens (e.g., art, language, religion), and explain how these characteristics lead to our understanding of how they lived and how culture developed

Analyze the lifeways and characteristics of early world societies and their expansion into the Americas.

Explain lifeways of early societies (e.g., Hunter-Gatherer, Nomadic, permanent civilization), and identify their locations around the world

Analyze cultural characteristics of early societies around the world (e.g., language, art, technology, social structure)

Explain the migration of people from Asia to the Americas

Identify the location of early hunter gatherer societies in the Americas, and analyze the roles of geography and environment on their settlement and development

Analyze the development of complex societies, their characteristics, and interactions with one another.

Identify the characteristics of a complex society (e.g., economy that produces food surplus and ability to store food surplus, specialized jobs, systems for government, religion, art, technology) and analyze how those characteristics influenced social life

Analyze the impacts of the development of agriculture and herding on populations

Analyze the interaction between and spread of complex societies (e.g., migration, trade, agriculture, exchange of culture and/or language, religious conversion, colonization)

Explain the significance of the Fertile Crescent, identify its location, and analyze the role of natural resources in its development

Analyze the influence of geography on the development of the social, economic, and political structure of Indigenous civilizations in the Americas

Analyze the development of early cities, states, and empires, and the role of trade between the entities.

Analyze the environmental developments that accompanied the rise of urban river basin societies (e.g., reliable water source, irrigation, warmer weather with expanded growing seasons, richer soil for agriculture)

Identify early river cities on a map (e.g., Mesopotamia, Old Kingdom Egypt, Indus Valley, Yellow and Yangzi River basin), and analyze their government structures, leaders, laws, economic systems, religion and belief systems, social hierarchies, technological and social innovations, and relationship to the environment

Explain the role of trade and contact between early river valley civilizations

Analyze the reasons for the decline of the river valley civilizations

Analyze the interaction between nomads and their environments as well as the development of new states throughout Afro-Eurasia.

Analyze the role of nomads in the restructuring of the political landscape (e.g., establishment of regional trade networks, technological and social innovations such as horses and chariots)

Identify the locations of territorial states (e.g., Middle Kingdom Egypt, Mesopotamia Kingship, Vedic peoples, Shang State), and analyze their ethnic identity, government, and techniques of coexistence with other territorial states, response to environmental changes, trade networks, labor systems, and religion

Identify the location of small-scale political entities (e.g., microsocieties such as Austronesians, Mycenaeans, Minoans), analyze their cultural beliefs and social hierarchies, and argue how their role in trade impacted economies and technological advances

Argue the impacts of the establishment of major empires, smaller urban-based societies, and the ways they interacted with surrounding peoples.

Explain the characteristics of empires and analyze the ways empires differed from the river valley civilizations or territorial states

Argue the impacts of climate change, migrations, new technologies, and administrative innovations in the rise of new empires

Analyze the similarities and differences in the methods of ruling an empire and the lived experiences of individuals in the Neo-Assyrian (911-612 BCE) and Persian (560-331 BCE) empires in West Asia (Middle East), Vedics (1500-600 BCE) in South Asia, and early Zhou Empire (1045-771 BCE) in East Asia

Identify methods of government developed in the early empires, analyze how and why they developed, and argue who benefited

Analyze the interaction of the early empires with peoples on the margins such as the Greeks and the Phoenicians in the Mediterranean, and argue the impacts of those interactions

Analyze the similarities and differences of the complex urban-based societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas, the lived experiences of the people of Nubia, the Nok in West Africa, the Chavín of the Andes, and the Olmecs of Mesoamerica

Argue the impacts of the cultural, intellectual, political, economic, and environmental changes happening across Africa, Europe, and Asia during this time period.

Analyze cultural and environmental changes across Africa, Europe, and Asia (e.g., Vedic system of hierarchy in Northern India, Northern China's agriculture revolution, city growth on the Ganges plain), and argue the impacts of those changes

Analyze the political and economic changes across Africa, Europe, and Asia (e.g., Shang Yang reforms in the Qin dynasty and new methods of military campaigns, development of polis in Greece or civitas in Rome, development of a system of money), and argue the impacts of those changes

Analyze the intellectual changes across Africa, Europe, and Asia (e.g., Master Kong Fuzi or Confucius, Daoism, Siddhartha Gautama or the Buddha, Zoroastrianism, Greek philosophers and thinkers), and argue the impacts of those changes

Argue the reasons for the rise of the globalizing empires of the Afro-Eurasian world and compare their characteristics.

Analyze the definition of and conditions of a "globalizing empire"

Identify the locations of the empires of the Han Dynasty in China, the Roman Empire, and the Mauryan Empire on a map, and analyze the ways their geographic locations and the environment affected their expansion and influence

Analyze the formation and course of these globalizing empires including administration and government, labor systems, economic systems, social systems and hierarchies, and relationship to the environment, and argue the impacts of these developments and who benefited in these societies

Argue the impact of the influence of trade routes in connecting the Afro-Eurasian regions.

Analyze the use of roads and highways for communication, trade, and control within empires (e.g., roads in the Persian Empire, Roman Empire, and Qin and Han China), and argue their impacts

Analyze the development and use of the Silk Road and the role of caravan cities, and argue the impacts of the economic, cultural, and religious changes it brought

Identify the routes of Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, analyze the role of the environment on the success or failure of trade, and argue the economic and cultural influences and importance of navigational technology to the trade

Argue the impacts of the five major world religions on the development of societies and cultures through time.

Analyze the definition and characteristics of universalizing religion

Analyze the beliefs and religious practices of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, their development, and how they changed over time (e.g., central teachings, influence of the environment on teachings, social stratification within the religion, religious texts, religious observations)

Analyze the history of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, how they spread, the role of empires on their development,

Argue the impacts of Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam on the development of societies and cultures

Argue the ways Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam continue to influence society and culture today

Argue the influences of other belief systems throughout the ancient world on society and culture.

Explain the beliefs and religious practices of Bantus of Sub-Saharan Africa, Teotihuacanos of Mesoamerica, and Mayans in the Yucatan and their development, and analyze how they changed over time (e.g., central teachings, influence of the environment on teachings, social stratification within the religion, religious texts, religious observations)

Analyze the history and growth of the Bantus of Sub-Saharan Africa, Teotihuacan of Mesoamerica, and Mayans in the Yucatan, and argue the role of political unity on their development

Argue the impacts of Bantus of Sub-Saharan Africa, Teotihuacan of Mesoamerica, and Mayans in the Yucatan on society and culture

Argue the impact of the expansion of territorial influence across Afro-Eurasian regions from 300-1300 CE.

Analyze agricultural changes across Africa, Europe, and Asia from 300-600 CE, and argue the impacts on people and population numbers

Analyze the reasons for the growth of commercial cities such as Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt, Quilon in India, Melaka in Malaysia, and Quanzhou in China (e.g., new maritime technologies and empire expansion), and argue the impact of their growth

Analyze the influence of trade on the development of early sub-Saharan African states and societies including the Kingdom of Axum, Swahili coastal societies, and Timbuktu in West Africa

Analyze the cause and course of the Tang Dynasty's expansion into Korea and Japan, and argue its impact on those cultures

Explain the Black Death, and argue how its impacts were felt across Africa, Europe, and Asia

Argue the impact of the expansion of religion across Afro-Eurasian regions from 300-1300 CE.

Analyze the decentralization and spread of Islam in places such as Cordoba in Spain, Ghana in West Africa, and Baghdad in Central Asia, and argue the impacts of its growing influence and division

Analyze the spread of Christianity across Africa, Europe, and Asia including the role of the Vikings, Charlemagne, the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Crusades, and argue its political and cultural impacts on societies

Explain the philosophy of Confucianism, analyze its spread across Asia, and argue its impact