Human Geography: free lessons and course outline

California publishes no History-Social Science content standards for grade 9. The state's own standards document says so directly, explaining that grade nine is the year students traditionally choose a history-social science elective. This course is built as that elective, and it is anchored to the Analysis Skills strands that do run across every grade: chronological and spatial thinking, research and evidence, and historical interpretation. Ninth grade is the right year for human geography because it teaches a habit of mind the rest of the social science sequence depends on: asking where something is, why it is there, and what follows from its being there rather than somewhere else. The seven units follow the standard divisions of the discipline: the tools of spatial thinking, population and migration, culture, political geography, agriculture and rural land use, industry and development, and cities. The year opens with the tools, since a student who cannot read a projection or a density figure cannot evaluate anything built on one, and it ends with the models geographers use to predict each pattern.