NYCDOE: Passport to Social Studies - grade 5, Dominican Republic case study

Note to Teachers: To help with remote and hybrid learning, digital materials for this unit are available on the NYCDOE TeachHub. Access these materials by following these instructions.

This is a Social Studies curriculum guide for the Dominican Republic relating to the grade five scope and sequence, titled Dominican Republic Case Study. It was developed by a team of NYCDOE staff and teachers, in collaboration with scholars of the humanities and social sciences as well as museum curators. Students will immerse themselves in the topic by discussing focus questions, reading and analyzing a rich collection of diverse primary and secondary sources, examining artifacts, musical styles and lyrics, and interpreting images, such as: paintings, photographs, and maps.

This guide offers a multitude of perspectives on the geography, history and cultural practices of the second largest island in the Caribbean, where the European modern conquest and colonization in the Americas began. Topics of representative lessons in this unit include using geographical reasoning to analyze and evaluate specialized maps of the Dominican Republic in order to explore the idea of how where you live affects how you live, gathering evidence about the history of the Dominican Republic to evaluate significant events and make inferences about their importance, generating compelling questions for research about sugarcane production in the Dominican Republic, and understanding the effect baseball has had on the Dominican Republic and the culture of its people.

To evaluate student mastery of content knowledge, cognitive processes, and critical thinking skills, this unit includes formative assessments, and a performance-based assessment activity, which has students developing and effectively supporting an informational essay where they identify and describe how physical environments affect human activities and how human activities affect physical environments.

Please note: the complete set of NYCDOE K-8: Passport to Social Studies Core Curriculum materials include a wide-range of trade books and primary documents, in addition to this unit of study. In order to support rigorous social studies instruction and student inquiry, we recommend that teachers integrate these resources into their daily instruction and assessments plans.

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