Social Studies Grade 8 Curriculum Guide. Revised.

This Manitoba (Canada) curriculum guide includes the grade 8 overview, unit overviews and topics, focusing questions, specific objectives, and outline maps needed for the course. The teaching of the identified objectives is mandatory in Manitoba. Manitoba curriculum guides are produced in three different formats referred to as Level I, II, or III. This is considered a Level II document to be used in conjunction with the Level I social studies overview and the teacher's guide to the textbook, "People through the Ages." The teaching strategies and learning activities found in the teacher's guide have been developed from the topic objectives and the focusing questions of this guide. Each strategy or activity should satisfy one or more of these categories of objectives: (1) knowledge, (2) thinking and/or research, (3) attitude and value, and (4) social participation. This course focuses on ways of life and the changes that have evolved from very early times to the present. It is designed to help students explore the ways that people lived within certain societies of the past and to realize that life today is related closely to developments that have occurred through the ages. Students should be made aware that all societies have not developed or changed at the same rate or to the same degree. The intent is to encourage students to compare a wide variety of ways of life of the past and present in order to be able to examine contemporary life against a range of alternative possibilities. The study is divided into four units with suggested time frames for each unit: (1) life during very early and early historic times; (2) civilizations of the past; (3) life in early modern Europe; and (4) life in the modern world. (DK)