Grade 4

History

Geography

Civics and Government

Economics

Students are able to identify important people and events in order to analyze significant patterns, relationships, themes, ideas, beliefs, and turning points in New Mexico, United States, and world history in order to understand the complexity of the human experience.

Students understand how physical, natural, and cultural processes influence where people live, the ways in which people live, and how societies interact with one another and their environments.

Students understand the ideals, rights, and responsibilities of citizenship and understand the content and history of the founding documents of the United States with particular emphasis on the United States and New Mexico constitutions and how governments function at local, state, tribal, and national levels.

Students understand basic economic principles and use economic reasoning skills to analyze the impact of economic systems (including the market economy) on individuals, families, businesses, communities, and governments.

New Mexico: Describe how contemporary and historical people and events have influenced New Mexico communities and regions.

United States: Understand connections among historical events, people, and symbols significant to United States history and cultures.

World: Students will identify and describe similar historical characteristics of the United States and its neighboring countries.

Skills: Understand time passage and chronology.

Understand the concept of location by using and constructing maps, globes, and other geographic tools to identify and derive information about people, places, and environments.

Distinguish between natural and human characteristics of places and use this knowledge to define regions, their relationships with other regions, and patterns of change.

Be familiar with aspects of human behavior and man-made and natural environments in order to recognize their impact on the past and present.

Understand how physical processes shape the Earth's surface patterns and biosystems.

Describe how economic, political, cultural, and social processes interact to shape patterns of human populations, and their interdependence, cooperation, and conflict.

Describe how natural and man-made changes affect the meaning, use, distribution, and value of resources.

Know the fundamental purposes, concepts, structures, and functions of local, state, tribal, and national governments.

Identify and describe the symbols, icons, songs, traditions, and leaders of local, state, tribal, and national levels that exemplify ideals and provide continuity and a sense of community across time.

Become familiar with the basic purposes of government in New Mexico and the United States.

Understand rights and responsibilities of "good citizenship" as members of a family, school and community.

Understand that individuals, households, businesses, governments, and societies make decisions that affect the distribution of resources and that these decisions are influenced by incentives (both economic and intrinsic).

Understand that economic systems impact the way individuals, households, businesses, governments, and societies make decisions about goods and services.

Understand the patterns and results of trade and exchange among individuals, households, businesses, governments, and societies, and their interdependent qualities.

Identify important issues, events, and individuals from New Mexico pre-history to the present.

Describe the role of contemporary figures and how their contributions and perspectives are creating impact in New Mexico.

Describe local events and their connections and relationships to national history.

Identify the local, state, and national symbols (e.g., flag, bird, song).

Explain how historical events, people, and culture influence present day Canada, Mexico, and the United States (e.g., food, art, shelter, language).

Describe and explain how historians and archaeologists provide information about people in different time periods.

apply geographic tools of title, grid system, legends, symbols, scale and compass rose to construct and interpret maps;

translate geographic information into a variety of formats such as graphs, maps, diagrams and charts;

draw conclusions and make generalizations from geographic information and inquiry;

Identify a region as an area with unifying characteristics (e.g., human, weather, agriculture, industry, natural characteristics).

Describe the regions of New Mexico, the United States, and the Western Hemisphere.

Identify ways in which different individuals and groups of people view and relate to places and regions.

Explain how geographic factors have influenced people, including settlement patterns and population distribution in New Mexico, past and present.

Describe how environments, both natural and man-made, have influenced people and events over time, and describe how places change.

Understand how visual data (e.g., maps, graphs, diagrams, tables, charts) organizes and presents geographic information.

Explain how the Earth-Sun relationships produce day and night, seasons, major climatic variations, and cause the need for time zones.

Describe the four provinces (plains, mountains, plateau, and basin and range) that make up New Mexico's land surface (geographic conditions).

Describe how cultures change.

Describe how geographic factors influence the location and distribution of economic activities.

Describe types and patterns of settlements.

Identify the causes of human migration.

Describe how and why people create boundaries and describe types of boundaries.

Identify the distributions of natural and man-made resources in New Mexico, the Southwest, and the United States.

Explain how the organization of New Mexico's government changed during its early history.

Compare how the State of New Mexico serves national interests and the interests of New Mexicans.

Explain the difference between making laws, carrying out the laws, and determining if the laws have been broken, and identify the government bodies that perform these functions at the local, state, tribal, and national levels.

Describe various cultures and the communities they represent, and explain how they have evolved over time.

Compare and contrast how the various governments have applied rules/laws, majority rule, "public good," and protections of the minority in different periods of New Mexico's history.

Explain the difference between rights and responsibilities, why we have rules and laws, and the role of citizenship in promoting them.

Examine issues of human rights.

Understand when choices are made that those choices impose "opportunity costs."

Describe different economic, public, and/or community incentives (wages, business profits, amenities rights for property owners and renters).

Illustrate how resources can be used in alternative ways and, sometimes, allocated to different users.

Explain why there may be unequal distribution of resources (e.g., among people, communities, states, nations).

Understand and explain how conflict may arise between private and public incentives (e.g., new parks, parking structures).

Understand how the characteristics and benefits of the free enterprise system in New Mexico compares to other economic systems in New Mexico (e.g., acequia sytems).

Explain that government raises money by taxing and borrowing to pay for the goods and services it provides.

Identify patterns of work and economic activity in New Mexico and their sustainability over time (e.g., farming, ranching, mining, retail, transportation, manufacturing, tourism, high tech).

Explain how New Mexico, the United States, and other parts of the world are economically interdependent.

Explain that banks handle currency and other forms of money and serve as intermediaries between savers and borrowers.

Explain that money can be used to express the "market value" of goods and services in the form of prices.

Use data to explain an economic pattern.