Grade 9 · Christian · NGSS/CCSS-aligned
This is a year-long geography course built around one question: why does human life look so different from place to place, and what actually causes that — not what's the capital of where. Your child learns a small toolkit of ideas (climate, resources, colonialism, borders, trade) in the first third of the year, then spends the rest of the year using that same toolkit on six real regions of the world: the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia. By the end they should be able to hear a news story about a conflict or an economic crisis somewhere and explain the physical, economic, and political reasons behind it — not just recite facts about the place.
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This is the vocabulary and map-reading unit everything else depends on: latitude and longitude, climate zones, landforms, watersheds, and how maps distort reality depending on which projection they use. The big idea your child needs to walk away with is that a map is a choice, not a photograph — and that physical geography makes some places more likely to be settled than others, without guaranteeing it.
Locate any point on Earth's surface using latitude and longitude coordinates to the nearest degree.
Classify a described location into its correct climate zone (tropical, arid, temperate, continental, polar) using given temperature and precipitation data.
Explain why the Mercator projection distorts the relative size of landmasses at high latitudes while preserving shape and direction.
Compare an equal-area projection and a Mercator projection of the same country and identify what each exaggerates, minimizes, or omits.
Given an unfamiliar map of a place never discussed in class, infer which projection was likely used based on the distortion pattern visible at the map's edges.
Recall the names and one-sentence definitions of the five themes of geography (location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, region).
Explain how a river's watershed boundary determines which settlements and farms depend on the same water source, using a labeled watershed diagram.
Given a raw contour/elevation map of an unfamiliar region with no watershed lines drawn, predict where a new settlement's water would drain and justify the prediction using landform vocabulary.
Critique a published map's title, legend, and framing to identify what argument the mapmaker is making about a place (e.g., depicting a country as embattled, resource-rich, or peripheral).
This unit asks why people live where they live, and whether it's mostly physical geography or mostly history and decisions. It covers population density (two kinds), push and pull migration factors, cultural diffusion versus independent invention, and why a country's national statistic often doesn't describe any specific place inside that country.
Given a country's total population and land area, calculate arithmetic population density and distinguish it from physiological density when arable land data is provided.
Given a dot-density or choropleth population map of an unfamiliar region, identify which named Unit 1 physical-geography feature (climate zone, landform, water access) most plausibly explains a visible cluster or gap in population.
Explain why a region's actual population density diverges from what its physical geography alone would predict, using the Nile Valley/Sahara or an equivalent contrasting case, naming the specific non-physical factor responsible.
Given a scenario describing conditions in a place of origin and a destination, classify each named condition as a push factor, a pull factor, or neither.
Given population and physical-geography data for two unfamiliar countries not used in instruction, predict which country is under greater emigration pressure and justify the prediction by connecting at least one physical factor and one push/pull factor.
Given two documented cultural-practice cases (one with evidence of contact between cultures, one without), apply an evidence checklist to determine whether cultural diffusion or independent invention better explains the shared practice.
Given a country-level statistic about language, religion, or urbanization percentage, evaluate whether that statistic can be assumed to hold true for a specific named sub-region or city within that country, using a provided sub-national map.
Given population density and physical-geography data for four wholly unfamiliar countries with no worked precedent of this exact combination, generate a written prediction of migration pressure for each, identify which prediction the data contradicts, and propose the specific non-physical mechanism responsible without being supplied a candidate list.
Given a new country's urbanization rate over three decades and a short passage describing rural land-tenure and urban job-market conditions, infer the push/pull mechanism driving the trend rather than attributing it to vague 'modernization,' applying the same reasoning routine modeled on a different country the day before.
This is the unit where colonialism becomes a real explanatory tool instead of a history fact. Your child learns GDP per capita and HDI, sorts jobs into economic sectors, and then works through paired country cases to build the idea that today's wealth gaps trace back to colonial trade relationships, not climate or effort.
Calculate GDP per capita from total GDP and population figures for a given country using the standard division formula.
Explain why GDP per capita, as a single average figure, can misrepresent the actual distribution of wealth within a country.
Classify a list of described jobs into primary, secondary, tertiary, or quaternary economic sectors.
Predict how a country's dominant sector mix (e.g., primary-heavy vs. tertiary-heavy) relates to its likely GDP per capita, and justify the prediction using the value-added concept.
DIAGNOSTIC/PRIMING TASK, NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT OBJECTIVE: output is not scored for correctness. Produce a draft, original explanation for why two countries with similar resource endowments have diverged economically, using only paired data (no theory given yet). Success on this task is not evidence of content understanding; a plausible-sounding but content-empty narrative (e.g., 'better leadership,' 'luckier trade deals') is an expected and acceptable outcome. Its purpose is to generate a public first attempt for the student to revise against the theory named on Day 7, per the Schwartz et al. (2011) contrasting-cases design.
Compare two colonial case studies (e.g., a plantation-extraction colony and a settler colony) to identify the common abstract structure of core-periphery relationships.
Construct a written argument explaining why a colonized country and a never-colonized country with similar resource endowments diverged economically, using GDP, HDI, and export data as evidence.
Evaluate whether the core-periphery/dependency model adequately explains a country's development trajectory that the model was not built to predict (e.g., a rapidly industrializing former periphery nation).
This unit argues that borders are drawn to serve whoever drew them, not the people living inside them. It covers the state/nation/nation-state vocabulary, the Berlin Conference's role in African border-drawing, and three distinct ways sub-state political change happens: devolution, irredentism, and secession.
Classify a given political entity (e.g., Japan, Nigeria, Kurdistan, Somalia) as a nation-state, a stateless nation, a multinational state, or a state without a strong national identity, using its ethnic/religious composition and governance structure as evidence.
Explain how the 1884-85 Berlin Conference's boundary-drawing process created present-day conflict potential in at least one named African state, citing the specific mismatch between the drawn line and pre-existing ethnic or linguistic territory.
Compare a devolution case, an irredentism case, and a secession case to identify what distinguishes the three mechanisms of sub-state political change from one another.
Given a previously unseen border-conflict case description, infer which mechanism (colonial boundary mismatch, resource competition, irredentist claim, or devolution/secession failure) is most likely driving the conflict, based on textual and map evidence provided.
Evaluate whether a proposed 'redraw the border' solution would resolve a given conflict, based on whether the underlying population is geographically separable or intermixed at the local scale.
Given two border conflicts, one with a colonial-legacy origin and one without, generalize a rule for when 'redraw the border' is and is not a viable solution mechanism, extending beyond the two specific cases provided.
Cite specific textual evidence from a primary or secondary source describing a border conflict to support a claim about which mechanism is driving that conflict.
Recall the definitions of sovereignty, state, nation, nation-state, devolution, irredentism, and secession with accuracy sufficient to apply them without a reference card.
This is the first regional unit, and it's chosen to be the easiest entry point — familiar territory, English-language sources, lower reading demand. Your child applies the full four-part toolkit (physical, population, economic, political) to the Americas, studies the colonial legacies of four different European powers, and directly tests the tempting-but-wrong idea that being close to the US is what makes a country rich.
Given elevation and precipitation data for the Andes and Amazon basin, the student identifies which physical features most constrain population settlement patterns in South America.
The student classifies a set of six Latin American countries by their dominant colonizing power (Spanish, Portuguese, British, French) using named institutional and linguistic evidence.
Given per-capita GDP, colonizer type, primary export type, and distance-to-US data for 10 countries with no variable pre-identified as the cause, the student infers which variable best explains variation in development outcomes and rejects proximity as the primary cause using a contradicting case.
Given a case where USMCA's stated goal appears met on the surface (a favorable headline statistic) but a second data point contradicts the colonial-legacy mechanism taught on Day 8, the student reconciles the two pieces of evidence and explains which one actually reflects the underlying economic mechanism, using citations from a provided text.
Given migration data for Venezuela-to-Colombia flows and Mexico-to-US flows, the student differentiates push factors from pull factors that are region-specific versus economic in origin for each case.
The student explains why São Paulo and Mexico City grew into megacities by connecting at least two toolkit categories (economic pull factors and colonial-era administrative centrality) rather than citing population growth alone.
Given a country the student has not studied in this unit (e.g., Paraguay or Suriname) and only raw data (no toolkit labels), the student produces a four-part toolkit profile and identifies which category is weakest in available evidence.
The student critiques whether 'the Americas' functions as a coherent geographic region or is itself a constructed grouping, using evidence of internal variation from this unit's data on at least three countries.
Europe is a genuinely different kind of region: instead of colonial imposition, it's centuries of nation-state conflict followed by voluntary, negotiated integration into the EU. Your child studies Europe's physical geography, the unresolved WWI/WWII border disputes, how EU governance actually splits power between national and supranational levels, and Brexit as the case where integration reversed.
Label and describe at least five major physical features of Europe (the North European Plain, the Alps, the Rhine and Danube rivers, the Scandinavian Peninsula/Iberian Peninsula) and state one way each has historically shaped settlement or trade.
Explain how the specific unresolved border and ethnic-minority disputes left after WWI (e.g., the redrawing of Central/Eastern European borders) contributed causally to WWII and to Cold War division, using Unit 4's colonial-boundary and ethnic-pluralism vocabulary.
Sort a list of at least ten specific EU policy areas (currency, defense, immigration/border control, agricultural subsidy, criminal law, trade tariffs, environmental regulation, taxation, healthcare, monetary policy) into 'fully national,' 'shared/coordinated,' and 'fully supranational' categories, and justify two placements using specific EU governance facts.
Compare the EU's depth of integration (shared currency, free movement of labor, supranational court, common external tariff) against Unit 5's NAFTA/USMCA trade bloc on the same four dimensions, and generalize a rule for what distinguishes a 'trade bloc' from a 'supranational union.'
Given real GDP-per-capita and HDI figures for at least eight specific European countries (a mix of EU members and non-members), plot them and explain why using a single continental average would misrepresent the actual range of economic conditions across Europe.
Using the Brexit case as a contrasting case against continued EU membership, infer at least two general conditions under which a member state's cost-benefit calculation for supranational integration would flip from net-positive to net-negative.
Categorize a set of real European migration examples (Polish workers in Germany, Syrian refugees resettled in Germany/Sweden, British retirees in Spain, EU-to-non-EU emigration) as internal-EU movement, external-to-EU immigration, or EU-outbound emigration, and explain how the EU's free-movement policy specifically enables the internal-EU category.
Given a data packet (GDP/HDI, trade dependency, public-opinion polling, and a summary of sovereignty implications) for a named non-EU European country not previously discussed in class, construct a written argument for or against EU membership that explicitly weighs sovereignty costs against economic benefits rather than listing them separately.
This unit takes the colonial-boundary and resource-conflict mechanisms from Unit 4 and applies them where they show up most densely. Your child works through four cases (Rwanda, Sudan/South Sudan, DRC, Nigeria) with heavy support at first, then two brand-new cases with none — one of which is the summative. A second thread runs the whole unit: who benefits when a region gets described mainly through its wars.
Label the physical-geographic features (Sahara, Sahel, Rift Valley, major oil fields) on a blank map of Africa and the Middle East and state one resource or agricultural implication of each.
Explain how a specific Berlin Conference decision (e.g., the 1884-85 partition lines) created a border that ignored a pre-existing ethnic or linguistic boundary, using a named country example.
Given the Rwanda case fully worked (colonial decision, ethnic ID policy, post-independence trigger), reproduce the same causal-chain structure to explain the Sudan/South Sudan split without teacher modeling of that specific case.
Compare Rwanda and a colonial-history-similar neighboring country that did not experience the same level of post-independence violence, and identify the specific point in each causal chain where the two diverge.
Explain the rentier-state mechanism (resource revenue -> reduced need to tax citizens -> reduced government accountability -> conflict incentive) using Nigeria as the worked case.
Given sources on a Middle Eastern rentier state not covered in direct instruction (e.g., a Gulf state other than the worked example), classify whether the resource-curse mechanism applies fully, partially, or not at all, citing specific source evidence for the classification.
Given a full source set (primary and secondary) on a conflict in a country never discussed in this unit or Unit 4, construct an original two-link causal chain from colonial-era decision to post-independence trigger with no modeled example of that country available.
Evaluate, using evidence from a conflict-focused source set versus a growth/development data set for the same countries, who benefits from describing a region mainly through its conflicts, and construct a counter-argument to the conflict-only frame.
Identify the stated purpose and one concrete action of the African Union and the Arab League from primary organizational documents or charters.
Explain how the African Union's voluntary-integration model contrasts structurally with the imposed-border colonial model studied earlier in the unit, using the EU comparison from Unit 6 as an analogical anchor.
Produce a written case-study analysis of one African and one Middle Eastern conflict that traces each to a specific colonial-era decision, builds a two-link causal chain to a post-independence trigger, and evaluates whether resource wealth made the conflict better or worse, integrating cumulative Unit 3-4 concepts (GDP/HDI, sovereignty, boundary mechanism).
The first half of this unit is genuinely new material: monsoon Asia's physical geography, why Japan, South Korea, and China industrialized so differently from the colonial-extraction pattern, and the demographic pressures facing China, India, and Japan. The second half isn't new content at all — it's the real test of whether the four-part toolkit actually became a general tool, by having your child compare two regions that were never paired together anywhere else in the course.
Given a monsoon precipitation map and a rice-agriculture labor-intensity dataset for South/East Asia, the student explains the causal chain from monsoon seasonality to historical settlement density, naming the human-decision link (labor organization, land tenure) at each step rather than stopping at climate.
The student recalls the specific historical mechanisms (postwar land reform, Cold War-era foreign aid, export-oriented industrial policy) that produced Japan and South Korea's rapid industrialization.
Given China's post-1978 reform data (coastal special economic zones, export volumes, GDP per capita over time), the student applies the land-reform/foreign-investment/export-policy causal model from Japan and South Korea to explain China's industrialization, identifying where the model fits and where China's path differs (state-directed vs. private-sector-led investment).
Given population pyramids for China, India, and Japan, the student compares their demographic structures and classifies each country's position in the demographic transition model, distinguishing high-growth, transitional, and aging-population profiles.
The student calculates a simple dependency ratio (non-working-age population divided by working-age population) from raw population data for Japan at two time points and infers the labor/fiscal pressure implied by the change.
Given trade-flow data for at least four Pacific Rim economies before formal instruction, the student proposes an initial explanation for why Pacific Rim trade networks developed around ocean shipping routes and port cities rather than overland routes, which the subsequent lesson then confirms, corrects, or extends.
Given full four-category (physical, population/culture, economic, political) toolkit data for two regions the student has NOT yet compared in this unit (e.g., Europe and Africa/Middle East, or the Americas and Asia), the student constructs a written causal explanation of one major difference between the two regions, connecting at least two toolkit categories in a single causal chain rather than listing them separately.
Given the full six-region dataset compiled across the course, the student generalizes a rule for when physical geography versus human decision-making better explains a region's developmental outcome, and defends that rule against at least one region that appears to violate it.
In the capstone essay, the student critiques their own first-draft causal comparison by identifying which toolkit category is under-used or missing in their explanation of the chosen regional difference, and revises the essay to correct it.
From the parent guide
This is a year-long geography course built around one question: why does human life look so different from place to place, and what actually causes that — not what's the capital of where. Your child learns a small toolkit of ideas (climate, resources, colonialism, borders, trade) in the first third of the year, then spends the rest of the year using that same toolkit on six real regions of the world: the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia. By the end they should be able to hear a news story about a conflict or an economic crisis somewhere and explain the physical, economic, and political reasons behind it — not just recite facts about the place.
Unit 1 · what to expect
This is the vocabulary and map-reading unit everything else depends on: latitude and longitude, climate zones, landforms, watersheds, and how maps distort reality depending on which projection they use. The big idea your child needs to walk away with is that a map is a choice, not a photograph — and that physical geography makes some places more likely to be settled than others, without guaranteeing it.
The full guide covers all 8 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
Ready when you are
Free for 30 days · then $29/mo or $290/yr for the whole family · Cancel anytime, no questions asked.
Start your family's account