Social Studies

Bronxville Middle School social studies follows the New York State framework for teaching. Sixth grade includes a study of eastern hemisphere geography, history, culture, and government. Students study the paleolithic age and the neolithic revolution, the development of civilization in the river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Nile River, the Indus River, and the Yellow River. Students study comparative world religions, comparative classical civilizations, the Mediterranean world, Feudal Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic Caliphates, and interactions across the Eastern Hemisphere.

In seventh and eighth grades, students study American history from the time before Columbus to the present with a particular focus on New York State. Seventh graders study native Americans, the development of Spanish, French, Dutch, and English colonies, the growing tensions that led to the American Revolution, the historical development of the Constitution, the Constitution in action, westward expansion, nineteenth century reform movements, and the challenges that led to the Civil War. Eighth graders begin with the era of Reconstruction and continue to the Progressive Era, American expansion and imperialism, World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, American post-War foreign policy, demographic change, and the domestic politics and reform of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.

In keeping with the state's framework, the social studies department has also focused on skills development, including historical thinking, geographic reasoning, economic reasoning, critical and historical reasoning, and research.