World History

Sixth grade is when a child’s history education stops being about their own country and starts being about the world they actually live in. The standards that govern this year — geography shaping civilization, the development of writing and law and religion, the long argument between democracy and autocracy that started in the ancient Mediterranean — are the load-bearing ones for everything that follows. This nine-week program walks through them in chronological order, six ancient civilizations deep enough to remember, with primary sources at every stop and full answer keys.

Week 1 opens with what makes a civilization a civilization — cities, government, surplus food, specialization, writing, shared culture — and the geographic conditions that produced the first ones. Week 2 puts your child in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, where three laws from the Code of Hammurabi (1754 BCE) become the lens for analyzing how Babylonian society actually worked. Week 3 follows the Nile through three thousand years of ancient Egypt, with the Great Pyramid as the running case study of what a Bronze Age state was capable of organizing.

Eastern Civilizations and the Greek World (Weeks 4-6)

Week 4 turns to ancient India: the Indus Valley civilization at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the rise of Hinduism, and Siddhartha Gautama’s search for the end of suffering that became Buddhism. Week 5 covers ancient China — the Mandate of Heaven, the dynastic cycle, Confucius, the Great Wall — and a ride on a Silk Road caravan from Chang’an to Samarkand that previews the cultural exchange theme of Week 8. Week 6 brings the ancient Mediterranean into focus through one day in the Athenian Assembly in 432 BCE: the city-states, the radically different experiments at Athens and Sparta, and the philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) whose vocabulary the modern world is still using.

Rome, Source Analysis, and Cumulative Review (Weeks 7-9)

Week 7 follows Rome through both halves of its story — the Republic, the slide into empire, the law and engineering and roads, the rise of Christianity inside it, and a worked analysis of why Rome fell that trains your child to think about historical causes in layers rather than single villains. Week 8 is the historian’s toolkit week: comparing the major belief systems from earlier units, then learning to read two accounts of the same battle written by people on opposite sides. Week 9 treats the ancient world the way historians actually treat it — as one connected story — with cumulative review, cross-civilization comparison, and a final evidence-based argument about how ancient societies linked together and what they passed on.

Each week includes living history passages, primary sources (the Code of Hammurabi, the Gettysburg Address’s distant ancestors), worked examples, and full answer keys with teaching notes. The pace is one worksheet per day for a five-day track, or three worksheets for a flex track if you need a lighter week. Common Core 6.1 through 6.5 is covered in full.