Welcome to the Summer Course

Early Modern - Islamic History

for Primary Grades!

This course is designed for grades 1 through 4.

The summer course runs for 6 weeks, with 2 lessons each week, and is a condensed and abridged form of our Primary Grades Book 3 Early Modern for Primary Grades, and will cover cover the following topics:

Week 1: The Ottoman Empire

Week 2: The Ottoman Empire (contd)

Week 3: The Mughal Empire

Week 4: Pirates

Week 5: The Safavids

Week 6: The Slave Trade

For a more comprehensive course, integrating Islamic history into global history and teaching several 21st century skills, graphic designs and different note taking formats, sign up for our academic courses running from September to June!

What do you learn in this course:

The Stories of different Muslim Empires

The geographical context of these empires

The historical context of these empires

How to extract information from graphics

Time lining

Activities

The Summer Course – Early Modern program includes the following: 

• Live Lessons on Zoom
• Chapters from History Connections Book 3 – Primary Grades 
• Pages from History Intersections

Classes run Monday & Wednesday 10 am PST

Starting June 24th 2024

Elements in the lessons:

Inquiry: throughout this curriculum, the teacher is modeling asking questions. Students learn how to ask questions and extract information from images and maps. This is a pre-research skill.

Discussion: Discussion questions help students recap the major events in a story and practices comprehension. 

This is not an exam or a drill. These questions are intended to consolidate what the child learned from the text. The child can look at images in the book when answering the questions.

Reading: Learning how to read a historical text is a skill that will benefit a student throughout his/her life. The goal is not to read as many lines as possible, but to read each line with attention, looking to comprehend the text.

Since reading levels vary, we give suggestions where needed for those with lower and higher reading levels. Praise the student for their reading regardless of how much they read. Encourage the student to try and focus on understanding the information being read rather than phonetically reading the text. It is not always an easy job to extract information from text and may require a substantial effort from the students. Therefore, going slow is not a problem, as the goal is to master the skill of reading and comprehending what has been read.

Activities: Every week the child will complete an activity that relates to the topic of the week. This will help students internalize the information covered. Activities are varied and alternated, in order to keep students engaged. Doing activities teaches young children different skills and abilities, such as fine motor skills, strategic thinking, hand-eye coordination, and deduction.

Tracing a Map: The program asks the child to trace the Location Maps (provided). The action of physically tracing a map assures the information is integrated into memory. Please assure you have tracing paper available. The mapping activity allows students to get familiar with geography and teaches them to pay attention to certain geographical landmarks, such as rivers and seas, mountain ranges and oceans.

Sea of History Poster: The Sea of History poster is used with lessons that are directly about Muslims such as lessons about Muslim empires that emerged in that period. At the end of the year, the child will have a timeline that depicts all the important Muslim events in the Early Modern era, one after the other. This helps children visualize information.

Sticking the names of the Muslim powers and images of these selected topics in chronological order is a pre-time lining skill and such tangible activities help in the consolidation of information.

History Connections

History in Context

Our history program is called History Connections, because learning history is all about connections: connections to the past, and connections to each other. Knowing what happened in the past helps us make sense of our present. Knowing how we fit into the larger global history, helps us connect to others. Knowing our heritage gives us a place to belong. Knowledge of history even gives us a basis to determine future actions. Currently, the world has become a global community, making global history all the more pressing. This program focusses on teaching 21st century skills, rather than rote memorization of facts, as this teaches students important skills to function in the modern society of the future.

Our History Connection series covers the ancients all the way up to the modern history and current issues. This series is intended for grade 1 through 8.

Every year students will take a chunk of this history. In the first book, students will cover from Creation to about 500 C.E. In the second book, they will cover from 500 C.E. until about 1650 C.E. The third era will cover from 1650 C.E. until the Industrial Revolution, approximately 1850 C.E. The last era, the Modern Era, will cover from 1850 C.E. until our current day.

All Eras have Islamic History integrated within global history, with more attention and time spend on important topics in the history of our Ummah.

The four books in this curriculum are consecutive, not only in chronological information but also in building skills.