Common Core - Common Core Curriculum: United States History, Grades 3-5

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Cover image: White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas by George Catlin | Corbis

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White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas by George Catlin | Corbis
A Frigate-Dominic Serres National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Common core curriculum: United States history, grades 3-5/Common Core, Inc. 1
pagescm. (Common core u.s. and world history)
Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-52696-5 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-118-58336-4 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-118-58341-8 (epub)
1.United StatesHistoryStudy and teaching (Elementary)2.United StatesHistoryStudy and teaching
(Elementary)Standards.
LB1581.C724 2014
973.071dc23

2013045498

The Alexandria Plan is Common Cores curriculum tool for teaching United States and world history. It is a strategic framework for identifying and using high-quality informational texts and narrative nonfiction to meet the expectations of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts (ELA) while also sharing essential historical knowledge with students in elementary school (kindergarten through fifth grade). These resources can be used in either the social studies block or the ELA block during the elementary school day. The curriculum helps teachers pose questions about texts covering a wide range of topics: from the caves at Lascaux to King Tuts tomb, Chief Joseph to Kubla Khan, and the birth of democracy to the fall of the Berlin Wall. These books tell stories that thrill students. Accompanying text-dependent questions (TDQs) will elevate student learning to a level that will help them master the new CCSS for English language arts (CCSS-ELA).

We call these curriculum materials the Alexandria Plan because we enjoy thinking about the role that theyand the teachers who use themplay in passing along important knowledge to future generations. In ancient Egypt, the Library of Alexandria, along with a museum, was part of a grand complex that sought to collect and catalog all the knowledge in the world. It became a center of learning, attracting scholars, philosophers, scientists, and physicians from all corners of the earth. Though it fell to fire, the spirit of Alexandria remains. Some twenty-three hundred years later, a new library stands near the site of its ancient ancestor, and the story of Alexandria and its great library inspires our efforts to help teachers illuminate the future by inculcating in their students an understanding of the past.

The Alexandria Plan is the second in a suite of curriculum materials Common Core is developing to help educators implement the CCSS. In 2010, Common Core released its Curriculum Maps in English Language Arts. The Maps are a coherent sequence of thematic units, roughly six per grade level, for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Now known as the Wheatley Portfolio, these resources connect the skills delineated in the CCSS with suggested works of literature and informational texts and provide sample activities that teachers can use in the classroom to reinforce the standards. The Wheatley Portfolio will soon grow, with resources to help educators enact the instructional shifts while cultivating in students a love of excellent booksall based on featured anchor informational and literary texts, poetry, and the arts. In summer 2013, we began rolling out a comprehensive, K12, CCSS-based mathematics curriculum known as Eureka Math, with embedded professional development. Please watch our website, commoncore.org, for future releases.

The CCSS-ELA emphasize the importance of literacy across the curriculum. Indeed, CCSS architect David Coleman has said, There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in kindergarten through fifth grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the artsperiod. Unfortunately, research has illustrated that history is one in a group of core subjects that have been squeezed out of many classrooms. The Alexandria Plan guides educators through the process of reprioritizing the teaching of history in the classroom and will assist teachers in addressing key CCSS-ELA while also meeting state social studies standards.

The print editions of the Alexandria Plan, each organized by subject and grade span, present essential content knowledge in United States and world history. United States history is separated into eighteen eras, and so is world history. To make this knowledge accessible to students in elementary school, we established two grade spans: lower elementary (kindergarten through second grade) and upper elementary (third grade through fifth grade). Each book contains one subject area (United States or world history) as well as the resources for teaching to one grade span (lower or upper elementary). Learning expectations articulate the key ideas, events, facts, and figures to be understood by students in a particular grade span. Suggested anchor texts; text studies (comprising TDQs and exemplar student responses, and accompanied by performance assessments based on one or more featured anchor texts); and more select resources flesh out the content for each era. The following is a detailed breakdown of what is contained in a given era of the Alexandria Plan as well as in the accompanying collection of era summaries that provide additional historical content for teachers.