History Units: INTRODUCTION

This project continues the partnership between Queen's University, Faculty of Education and Canada's Digital Collections. In 1998 Professor Egnatoff and his team of teacher candidates produced the first set of units of study for teachers. This year, 1999, our team has produced 5 new history units using Canada's Digital Collection as the primary learning resource.

Our focus was to prepare well researched, complete, ready-to-use units that busy teachers could take as they are or readily adapt. Realizing that Ontario teachers are challenged with implementing a new curriculum we specifically designed these units to meet many of the expectations of the new courses.

In particular, the unit on New France fits the Grade 7 course and the unit on World War I meets some of the expectations for theOntario Social Studies, History and Geography Curriculum (Grade 7)as well as almost all the expectations relating to The Great War of the Canadian and World Studies Curriculum (Grade 10). The units on World War II, Social and Political Movements of the Twentieth Century, and Canadian Heroes of the Twentieth Century meet some of the specific expectations of the required Grade 10 Canadian History courses (Applied and Academic) of the Canadian and World Studies Curriculum.

While our concern was to provide a useful learning resource to Ontario teachers we were conscious of the needs of teachers in all provinces and territories of Canada, especially beginning teachers. We hope these units can be adapted to different grade levels to meet some of your curriculum requirements.

We also hope that you will see that these units are built around an important assumption about how students learn. We understand that students learn best by talking and doing. Students need to learn history not by memorization but through active learning. Students need to think, research, discuss, recreate, role play and in general
— do history.