Middle School Social Studies
	At IDS, we delve beyond the history and social studies textbooks as we explore various cultures and diverse perspectives. Traditional topics, time periods and events shape the program, but students experience these rather than just record them to memory as a series of past events. We use interactive Web sites and interpret primary sources such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to imagine ourselves in the past and gain the richest comprehension of it. To do this well, students employ the whole toolbox of skills imparted in the earlier grades. We reinforce these skills through reading, writing, research, oral presentations and projects, using the Internet and digital technology of our time as major resources. We teach students to learn and retain new material through “reading-to-understand” techniques, which include identifying key text, summarizing main ideas, and generating review questions. We focus also on developing a student’s study and research skills: note-taking, organization, brainstorming, data collection and selection, and test-review strategies. We build historical models and create artistic representations of subjects to allow for alternative approaches to understanding them. Guest experts and field trips to regional sites enhance our studies of given topics. The sixth grade focuses on world cultures and the development of human societies. Students are asked to inquire, research, and apply the concepts discussed in the course to their own lives. Several important themes are revisited throughout the year related to the global human concepts of culture, government, economics and religion. This course also examine how often geography dictates ‘destiny,’ meaning how the environment shapes the way a society develops.  In seventh grade, students engage in a study of American history up through 1877, and develop strategies for reading and interpreting primary and secondary sources.  They continue to appreciate the importance of geography and economics in history, and learn to consult diverse research archives such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives.  The social studies program takes the lead in organizing and guiding the annual seventh grade trip to Washington, DC. By eighth grade, the social studies curriculum is a project-based seminar in American History that uses our neighboring towns and communities as a lab for historical exploration and discovery.  Through field studies and oral histories, students collect information on more recent American history. They work on individual and group projects to learn how to pose questions and conduct research to answer them as historians do. The course makes use of regularly scheduled expeditions to significant buildings and structures, libraries and historical sites to activate, enrich and deepen student learning.