High School History Unit: The Japanese World From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century

0.5 CREDIT HIGH SCHOOL COURSE/History

This is a digital product. It will be delivered via email as a PDF.

This is a high school level history unit, designed for students who already have a broad understanding of world history and are ready to take a deep dive into a specific time and place. Like most high school level curricula, it includes information that could be rated M for Mature. History is full of wars and violence. If mature content is a concern for you with your student, I encourage you to pre-read to assess your personal comfort level. (I use this curriculum with my own high school students, but comfort levels can be very personal things.) This is a completely secular program.

The 13 lessons in this unit are designed to cover one semester of high school history (0.5 credit), but you could easily stretch the course over a year by doing all of the included supplemental activities and dedicating more research time to projects and major assignments. Some lessons might wrap up in a week; others may take you two or more weeks to complete. My best advice is to find the pace that is comfortable for you and your student and follow that. Every lesson includes readings, questions to consider about the reading, optional additional resources, and an assignment to complete. Students should annotate as they read — future lessons will refer back to previous ones, so annotations will make this much easier! — but discussion questions can be answered however you like: aloud in conversation, in rough notes in a journal, or more formally in paragraph form. The optional supplemental activities let you explore the world behind the text more deeply — Japan has fascinating philosophical traditions that we only briefly touch on in this history course, and so I wanted to make sure students had some resources for deeper digging. These supplemental activities are totally optional.

The output assignments for each lesson are designed to be evaluated work, suitable for including in portfolios or assigning grades. Some of these output assignments are short and simple; others require substantial thought and work to complete. There are three major output assignments: an essay about Heian Japan, a connections activity using hexagonal thinking, and a biographical research essay. I have included grading suggestions for these three assignments, but they are just guidelines; you should obviously feel free to use your own evaluation systems.

YOU WILL NEED TO PROVIDE: A Brief History of Japanese Civilization (4th edition)

I’ve included links to all the readings you’ll need for these lessons, but because this unit doesn’t include lectures, I’ve used A Brief History of Japanese Civilization (4th edition) as a spine. It is not the most thrilling read, but it is full of useful information and a solid introduction to Japanese history. The page numbers and chapter titles indicated are from the 4th edition; if you’re using a different edition, you may need to adjust the reading.

(This full unit, including supplemental lectures, is available as part of the Deep Thought Year 3 curriculum. Lectures are not included with this product.)

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