Make Your City Grow What factors encourage the growth of civilizations ?

Your students will get lots of practice analyzing the economic, historical, and social factors that encourage growth in a civilization. The lessons embedded in this project encourage students to think broadly about how and why civilizations develop and how economies grow.

Trade is a fascinating topic for students, especially when you use modern examples to get them thinking. This project asks students to wonder about the things they buy: Where do these items come from? What resources were used to make them? What resources were used to transport them?

This unit asks students to think about how all cultures rely on earth’s resources. The unit specifically teaches student the economic terms: push factors, pull factors, patterns and connections. Using ancient Greece as an example, students learn that geography informs social, political and economic development.

The lesson starts with an introduction to the geography and culture of Ancient Greek city-states. As a teacher, you have the freedom to work slowly through the written texts, emphasizing note-taking and research methods, or you can move quickly to the project-based part of the learning.

For the project, students can work independently or in groups to locate and describe one city-state and two colonies. They will need to use a resource map, which I created for this assignment, to decide the best location of their city-state. This task demands that students use the resource map as evidence to support their decision-making process. Ambitious students can make their own resource map out of craft materials in order to showcase their city-state and colonies. However, a simple map or poster with an explanation of choices is also possible.

The project allows different types of learners to get engaged – students will do some hands-on crafting, creative writing, argumentative writing, and presenting.

I have been teaching this project for 4 years, and I've found that student love naming their city-state and its colonies, writing a creative origin story for their city-state, and deciding the hopes and dreams of the leaders of their city-state.

Most importantly, by the end of the unit, students can meaningfully answer the question the question: What choices do humans make when founding cities and colonies? My students are able to give concrete examples that demonstrate critical analysis of migration, colonization and trade including push and pull factors, geography, political and military strategy.

This assignment can easily be abbreviated to focus on only one or two elements of the project while still remaining meaningful.

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The package includes:

• 6 original student-accessible non-fiction passages that include illustrations
• introductory PowerPoint about city-states and the geography of Greece
• graphic organizer for notes and comparisons
• 3 assessments with answer keys
• full lesson plans for 10 days of teaching
• PowerPoint of Bellringer activities
• Ted Ed Flipped Classroom lesson with handouts
• bibliography for further research

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