Grade 4 · printable course

Regions of the United States: Land, People, and Government

Grade 4 · 332 pages · 72 lessons · PDF, print at home

This is a year-long tour of the United States done region by region: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, West, plus a final unit on how state and federal government fit together. Your child will read real maps and charts as evidence (not just look at pretty pictures), meet named indigenous nations as governments that still exist today, and figure out why a place with rocky soil built ports and cities while a place with rich soil built farms. By the end they should be able to look at any U.S. region and explain why the land, the people, and the government there look the way they do.

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What is inside

Every unit and lesson in this book, in order. The same lessons are taught online at lettersanddevotion.com, so a family can move between paper and screen.

Regions of the United States: Land, People, and Government

72 lessons · try a lesson online free

Unit 1: Reading the Land: Geography Tools for a Big Country8 lessons
  1. 1.The four standard map parts (title, key, compass rose, scale)
  2. 2.The five landform types and their defining physical features
  3. 3.The five landform types, applied to unseen examples
  4. 4.The relationship between climate region and human adaptation (clothing, shelter)
  5. 5.The difference in purpose between physical maps and political maps
  6. 6.The five U.S. regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, West) and their approximate borders
  7. 7.The relationship between a region's physical geography and its likely natural resources
  8. 8.The vocabulary terms landform, climate, and resource used in context
Unit 2: Nations Before and Alongside the United States10 lessons
  1. 9.The concept of a nation as a governed people, distinct from mapped land
  2. 10.The concept of a nation as a governed people, applied to a boundary case not covered by the sort cards
  3. 11.Sovereignty as the right to make binding self-governing decisions
  4. 12.The structure of a treaty (parties and mutual promise)
  5. 13.Removal as the cause of the gap between a nation's historic homeland and its present government location
  6. 14.Present-day tribal self-governance (elections, courts, laws) as evidence sovereignty continues, located by verb tense
  7. 15.The pattern that two accounts of one event can differ in emphasis and omission
  8. 16.Authorial purpose and perspective as the reason two accounts of one event differ
  9. 17.A written comparison of two treaty accounts, connecting content differences to author and purpose
  10. 18.The general reason (author, purpose, perspective) two historical accounts of one event differ, applied to a new, unstudied treaty
Unit 3: The Northeast: Trade, Cities, and Newcomers9 lessons
  1. 19.The Northeast region's location and major port cities
  2. 20.The terms port city, manufacturing, immigration, and population density
  3. 21.The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's council structure
  4. 22.The Haudenosaunee Confederacy's governance in the present day
  5. 23.The resource-to-industry production chain for one Northeast good
  6. 24.Colonial settlers and 1800s immigrants to Northeast port cities
  7. 25.A Northeast population density map paired with descriptive text
  8. 26.The link between a specific Northeast resource and a specific industry it supports
  9. 27.The resource-to-industry pattern applied to an untaught region without ports
Unit 4: The Southeast: Farmland, Labor, and Change10 lessons
  1. 28.The Southeast region's location and state boundaries
  2. 29.The relationship between Southeast climate/soil and plantation crop choice
  3. 30.The distinct roles of enslavers and enslaved people on a plantation
  4. 31.The causal chain from the 1830 Indian Removal Act to the Cherokee Trail of Tears
  5. 32.The continuity of Cherokee Nation sovereignty after removal
  6. 33.The economic structure of Southeast plantation agriculture versus Northeast colonial trade
  7. 34.The continuity and change between plantation-era and Sun Belt-era Southeast economies
  8. 35.The main idea and supporting details of a Trail of Tears informational text
  9. 36.Gain and loss analysis applied to an unstudied 20th-century Southeast industrial source
  10. 37.Cause-and-effect annotation across three points on a Southeast regional timeline
Unit 5: The Midwest: Farms, Factories, and the Middle of the Country8 lessons
  1. 38.The location of the Great Plains, Great Lakes, and Mississippi River
  2. 39.The relationship between flat, fertile land and agribusiness farming methods
  3. 40.The economic function (farming, manufacturing, or both) of specific Midwest cities as signaled by clue-card evidence
  4. 41.A bar graph of Great Lakes shipping tonnage by good type
  5. 42.Push and pull factors described in two Great Migration firsthand accounts
  6. 43.The reasons Great Migration newcomers chose Midwest cities over Midwest farms
  7. 44.Present-day governance and reservation land of the Ojibwe and Sioux Nations
  8. 45.Similarities and differences between Midwest and Northeast regional economies
Unit 6: The Southwest: Desert, Border, and Deep History9 lessons
  1. 46.The Southwest region's boundaries and major rivers (Colorado, Rio Grande)
  2. 47.The relationship between arid climate and the need for irrigation
  3. 48.The Navajo (Diné) Nation's present-day self-government
  4. 49.Formal water-rights allocation versus proximity-based fairness reasoning
  5. 50.The water-source map showing rivers, canals, and city locations
  6. 51.A bar or line chart of Southwest city populations
  7. 52.The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the border change it caused
  8. 53.The causal link between water access and Southwest city population size
  9. 54.Sources of Hispanic and Latino heritage traditions in the Southwest
Unit 7: The West: Coastlines, Gold Rushes, and the Newest Arrivals10 lessons
  1. 55.The five-region map of the United States, with focus on the West's borders
  2. 56.Specific named indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest and California and one identifying fact per nation
  3. 57.The causal link between a sudden resource discovery and rapid, large-scale migration
  4. 58.Contrasting primary-source excerpts on immigrant welcome versus Chinese Exclusion Act-era restriction
  5. 59.Differential impact of the Gold Rush on newcomers versus previously present nations and communities
  6. 60.Pacific trade routes connecting California ports to Asian ports, and the goods carried on them
  7. 61.The range of climates within the West region as evidence against a single-climate label
  8. 62.The structural comparison between West (Gold Rush, Pacific trade, Asian immigration) and Northeast (Unit 3 trade and immigration) migration stories
  9. 63.The general logic of comparing two regions' migration stories (claim, then evidence from each side), applied to an unstudied region pairing
  10. 64.The tension between a single region label and the West's actual variety in climate, economy, and history
Unit 8: One Country, Fifty States: How Government Connects the Regions8 lessons
  1. 65.The division between federal and state law-making power
  2. 66.Shared versus separate powers of federal and state governments
  3. 67.Tribal sovereignty as a distinct government alongside federal and state
  4. 68.Regional variation in the exercise of state power across two named U.S. regions
  5. 69.Population-based representation in Congress across the five regions
  6. 70.The relationship between regional population and congressional representation
  7. 71.The limits of a single map in representing federal-state-tribal governance differences across regions
  8. 72.Application of the federal/state/tribal power framework to a scenario where the taught surface heuristic misleads

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