History · Grade 5

Skills

• Builds a timeline spanning several eras with dates in roughly the right places.
• Knows roughly when the big turning points happened: farming, writing, printing, industrialisation, electricity, computing.
• Knows the outline of the last 300 years: industrialisation, empire and its end, the two world wars, the human-rights era, the digital era.
• Knows several individuals who changed history, in more than one field and more than one part of the world, and what each actually did.
• Knows that slavery, empire and genocide happened, in age-appropriate terms, and that history includes what was done badly as well as well.
• Knows how one everyday thing was invented and spread: the wheel, writing, printing, the engine, vaccination, the internet.
• Asks who made a source, when, and why, before trusting it.
• Explains a historical event in terms of causes and consequences, not just what happened.
• Judges a past decision by what was known at the time, not only by what we know now.
• Knows that history is written by people and gets revised — and that whose story gets told is itself a question.