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Indiana · 4th Grade · Social Studies

Indiana 4th Grade Social Studies: 14 True Stories

14 readings · 9 primary-source labs · 2 judgment labs · 25 of 32 standards

About this unit

This unit is a complete Indiana history course for fourth-grade students, written for teachers to use in their classroom. It covers the span from the ancient mound-building cultures that flourished thousands of years before European contact through the Great Migration of the early twentieth century, with additional readings on Indiana's constitution and state government. The unit contains fourteen readings, each with a Narrative Notes template, a student work page, and a teacher exemplar.

Read more about this unit

The readings follow Indiana's story in teaching order. Students begin with the Mississippian peoples who built a thriving mound town at Angel Mounds along Indiana's fertile river valleys, then learn how George Rogers Clark's frontier soldiers waded through freezing floodwaters for seventeen days to capture Fort Sackville from the British. Later readings tell the story of Levi and Catharine Coffin, who sheltered over a thousand freedom seekers as Indiana divided over slavery, and of African American families who left the Jim Crow South for steel mill jobs in Gary's industrial north.

Plan the unit

The unit is built as 25 classroom sessions: each of the 14 stories is a session, and its labs follow it as their own sessions. Teach one a day and you finish in five weeks; two a week fills a semester. Below is the order we suggest, with every handout and teacher file each session uses.

  • Story session — read, take Narrative Notes, do the work page
  • Primary-source lab — interpret a real document
  • Judgment lab — weigh a hard question

Week 1Weeks 1–2Weeks 1–3

Ancient peoples and frontier conflictSessions 1–5

Week 2Weeks 2–4Weeks 3–5

Statehood, settlers, and the fight over slaverySessions 6–10
Session9

Primary-source lab4.G.54.G.74.G.6

Why did pioneer families like the ones who crossed the Ohio River decide to leave their homes in Kentucky and move to the Indiana forest, even though they knew the land was swampy, thickly wooded, and said to make people sick? What did they hope their new life would be like?

Builds on Story 5

StudentsPrimary-source handoutInterpretation templatePrimary source 1Primary source 2Primary source 3
TeacherLesson planSlide deck · PDFSlide deck · PPTTemplate exemplar

Week 3Weeks 4–5Weeks 6–8

Conscience, war, and a changing IndianaSessions 11–15

Week 4Weeks 6–7Weeks 8–10

Industry, automobiles, and the home frontSessions 16–20

Week 5Weeks 7–9Weeks 11–13

Government, rights, and the Great MigrationSessions 21–25

Want this on paper? Print the plan, or download the whole unit as one ZIP.

Download the whole unit

Why teach it

Nine-year-olds remember what they can picture, and they can picture named people making hard choices. Fourteen readings give them those people — Little Turtle speaking for the Miami, Levi and Catharine Coffin opening their door, Madam C.J. Walker building a business, women like Mildred Harris riveting fighter planes in Evansville. Telling Indiana's history as a sequence of true stories, each with a person who wanted something and faced real obstacles, gives fourth graders a sturdy frame they can hold in memory and build on in later years. The primary-source labs ask students to step inside those people's thinking, and the judgment labs ask them to weigh difficult questions for themselves, so that the history stays with them as something they have reasoned about, not merely heard.

Standards alignment

This unit addresses 25 of the 32 standards in the 2026 Indiana Academic Standards: Grade 4 Social Studies. Every reading and every lab is planned against named standards, and the unit ships a standards-to-lesson map so teachers can see at a glance where each standard is taught. The seven standards not covered fall into three groups: skills such as creating timelines, estimating map distances, locating places on a map, and constructing a written narrative from sources, which have no characters or story arc and are better practiced as recurring routines or atlas exercises; definitional content such as listing the functions of money, which lacks a protagonist, conflict, and outcome; and two standards whose readings were set aside by the editors before publication.

Official Indiana Academic Standards document ↗See which lesson teaches each standardStandards-to-lesson map (PDF)

7 standards not covered by this unit
  • 4.H.12 — Research Indiana’s modern growth, emphasizing manufacturing, new technologies, transportation, and global connections.
  • 4.H.13 — Create and interpret timelines that show relationships among people, events, and movements in the history of Indiana. (Creating and interpreting timelines is a skill practiced across units, not narratable content.)
  • 4.H.14 — Construct a brief narrative about an event in Indiana history using primary and secondary sources. (Constructing a narrative from primary and secondary sources is a research-and-writing skill, not a story topic.)
  • 4.G.1 — Estimate distances between two places on a map when referring to relative locations. (Estimating map distances is a map-reading skill with no characters, conflict, or outcome.)
  • 4.G.2 — Locate Indiana on a map as one of the 50 United States. Identify and describe the location of the state capital, major cities, and rivers in Indiana. (Locating Indiana, its capital, cities, and rivers on a map is a map-identification skill best taught with atlas practice, not narrative.)
  • 4.E.3 — Explain that prices change as a result of changes in supply and demand for specific products.
  • 4.E.4 — List the functions of money, and compare and contrast things that have been used as money in the past in Indiana, the United States, and the world. (Listing the functions of money and comparing forms of money across places and times is definitional/comparative content without a narrative arc; it lacks a protagonist, conflict, and outcome.)