Home About NOCCS Curriculum After School Program NOCCS Community

Social Studies

The NOCCS social studies curriculum calls on students to analyze, research, and interpret major geographical and historical events and their relationship to the contemporary world.  Teachers design units of study that are based on California Content Standards, and that address students’ interests and experiences.  Students learn to distinguish fact from opinion and connect cause and effect through studying historical, economic, geographical, and social events and phenomenon. Students and teachers work together to establish a classroom understanding of individual and community rights and responsibilities. In grades K- 1st, students begin by connecting to their immediate environment and prior knowledge.  From here, 2nd-5th graders move outward to develop important linkages with the larger social and geographic world.  Units of study also reach back in time to connect students with people whose stories and deeds build an appreciation of the continuity of human experience.

 

Social Studies Outcomes

Chronological and Spatial Thinking

1 Students place key events and people of the historical era they are studying in a chronological sequence and within a spatial context; they interpret time lines.

2  Students correctly apply terms related to time, including past, present, future, decade, century, and generation.

3  Students explain how the present is connected to the past, identifying both similarities and differences between the two, and how some things change over time and some things stay the same.

4  Students use map and globe skills to determine the absolute locations of places and interpret information available through a map's or globe's legend, scale, and symbolic representations.

5  Students judge the significance of the relative location of a place (e.g., proximity to a harbor, on trade routes) and analyze how relative advantages or disadvantages can change over time.

Research, Evidence, and Point of View

1  Students differentiate between primary and secondary sources.

2  Students pose relevant questions about events they encounter in historical documents, eyewitness accounts, oral histories, letters, diaries, artifacts, photographs, maps, artworks, and architecture.

3  Students distinguish fact from fiction by comparing documentary sources on historical figures and events with fictionalized characters and events.

 Historical Interpretation

1 Students summarize the key events of the era they are studying and explain the historical contexts of those events.

2  Students identify the human and physical characteristics of the places they are studying and explain how those features form the unique character of those places.

3  Students identify and interpret the multiple causes and effects of historical events.

4   Students conduct cost-benefit analyses of historical and current events.

Curriculum