Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai: Social Studies Unit 3, Grade 7 (Letters & Devotion)

Description

Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai is Unit 3 of World Geography and the Medieval World, 500-1500 CE (Grade 7), the Letters & Devotion Social Studies course, complete in one printable PDF: 9 lessons, the unit check-up and the answer key, 57 pages.

• The gold-salt weight-for-weight exchange rate and the geographic scarcity that produced it
• The physical geography of the Sahel and the trans-Saharan trade routes
• The succession of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai as trade-based states
• Syncretism between Islam and traditional West African practice in Mali
• The comparative reliability and limits of griot oral tradition versus outsider-authored written accounts of Mali
• The causes of the imbalance between outsider-authored and West African-authored written records of Mali
• The relationship between trade-route dependence and the durability of a state’s wealth
• The combined and separate evidentiary value of griot oral tradition and outsider written accounts about Mali
• The general principle that oral and written historical sources have complementary, non-overlapping evidentiary limits

Every lesson is written for a parent with no teaching background: it opens with a short script to read aloud, names the specific wrong idea a student is likely to reach for and how to correct it, and closes with a practice sheet you may copy for your household. Scripture references are King James Version throughout. Black-and-white, 8.5 x 11 in. The whole year of this course is also in this store as a single book.

AI note: The written content of this resource was drafted with AI tools, then reviewed and edited by the author.