High

Investigates the driving forces behind this brilliant period of artistic and scientific achievement. Discover how humanists like Petrarch pioneered the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman culture, sparking an explosion of creativity and innovation. Changes abound in politics and religion as well.

What was it like to live during the Renaissance? This program explores the typical homes, diets, and clothing of the period. Examines how due to a surging economy, many people had more money to spend on new household items, spices, and clothing. Witness the changing roles of work, education, religion, art, and family life over three centuries across Europe.

Explores the newly discovered uses of realism, mathematics, and perspective in art; the introduction of new musical instruments and changes in musical style; and how literature flourished thanks to the innovation of the printing press. Explores Leonardo, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare, whose works continue to be admired and emulated today. DVD divided into chapters.

Explores the people, ideas, and inventions behind the major scientific breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, anatomy, and mathematics. Examines scientific greats including Galileo, Kepler, and Brunelleschi, and discusses how the life of a scientist often conflicted with existing religious beliefs. DVD divided into chapters. Includes discussion questions and Spanish soundtrack option.

During the Renaissance, sailors set off into uncharted waters in search of new trade routes and lucrative luxury goods. Advancements in navigational tools, including lateen sails and the astrolabe, aided explorers such as Columbus and da Gama on their journeys.

This exciting program uncovers the seeds of the American Revolution and explains that the causes were rooted in England's imperial policies. It introduces the resistance leaders, Patriots and Loyalists, and the events leading to the Boston Massacre. See how the Coercive Acts, passed in response to the Boston Tea Party, helped unite the colonies.

From fiction to nonfiction, short stories to poems to memoirs, creative and narrative writing often stem from writers' imaginations or personal interests, weaving together believable characters, settings, and plots.

Presents the basics of expository writing, from composing the introduction and the thesis statement to assembling body paragraphs to writing an effective conclusion.

Writers, ranging from a sportswriter for a school newspaper to a student working on a research project, demonstrate the processes of developing a focused thesis statement as well as structuring and writing solid introductory, supporting and concluding paragraphs.

This program suggests strategies to help discern the appropriate tone for a piece of writing based on purpose and audience. Student writers, ranging from an avid cyclist on a fundraising campaign for an upcoming school trip to a writer communicating with her fellow club members on the Internet, use formal and informal writing to accomplish their task.

In this program, a young writer must compose a convincing letter to the school news paper to win his classmates' votes for student council, while another writer is challenged to research and write a supporting argument in favor of an issue that she feels strongly against.

Students will explore how society uses the Earth's resources to meet our most basic needs for food, water and shelter, and how those same resources influence how and where we live. Through our use and misuse of technology, students will see how we impact the world around us and conversely, how the forces of the ever-changing Earth shape our lives as well.

Imagine that someone from another country has asked you to describe the United States in a single sentence -- not an easy task! However, dividing America into regions and comparing and contrasting them can help explain our nation's unique natural, physical and cultural features.

Why do people settle where they do? Why do populations move from one place to another? In Human Systems, students will appreciate the role that the physical characteristics of Earth have played in determining where and how people live, and explore the notion that where and how we live has a huge impact on our planet.

Earth is a vast, diverse and complicated place, but breaking it down into regions allows us to simplify the whole. In Places & Regions, students will understand the physical and human characteristics that combine to form the areas we create to interpret our planet's complexity.