Teachers' Index
Lower Secondary Grades 6 and 7
Geography and World Cultures
Sixth and Seventh grade: Sixth grade begins with the the languages, art, music, and literature of the Americas, Europe, and Oceania. Seventh grade continues with Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. The studies should also include follow-up consideration of how peoples in these regions faced the challenges of Industrialization, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Militarism, introduced in the fifth grade. Although not as extensively as the American students, Japanese students study about a semester of world geography in sixth and seventh grade, so there is some potential for exchange projects. The best time to work with these grades is in the fall or winter.
In the Language Arts, there are many possibilities for supplementing Geography and Culture units with related novels. A unit on the Caribbean corresponds well with the novel, The Cay, by Theodore Taylor. The following three week lesson plan, "Examining Bias in a Global Perspective: from newspaper articles, a novel (The Cay, by Theodore Taylor), to our own stories", is a example of what can be done cross-curricularly.