FOCUS: Middle School History aims to provide middle school history teachers with lessons that incorporate economics into a variety of world history topics. The publication contains 23 lessons with downloadable visuals and activities, and each lesson is correlated to the CEE's Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics.
While the publication's lessons are geared for the middle school, many can be easily used at a high school level. The lessons generally include an activity that engages the students. We also use original documents in a couple of lessons to give the student a feel for history as it was originally written. Finally, each lesson includes a “Connections” section. The intent of the section is to connect the lesson to other concepts or to other points in time. How the connection is accomplished varies by lesson—some include ideas of how concepts apply to other times, some include small lessons or references to websites. The Connections section should help teachers relate the economic concepts in the lesson to other historic ideas.