Cause & effect · The road to revolution · Grades 6–8
Premise: Students trace the chain of events from new British taxes through the Boston Tea Party, Britain's harsh response, and the outbreak of fighting, to the Declaration. The focus is distinguishing causes from effects and avoiding the "came before, so it caused it" trap.
Students examine the case evidence and solve four locks (a root-cause MC, a word lock, a chronological order lock, and a causes-vs-not-causes evidence sort). Each lock reveals a short reasoning explanation. The answer key is not shown on this page.
Student activity: grade68/causeeffect-student.html · ~10–15 minutes · works on tablets, laptops, and interactive whiteboards.
Skills & standards alignment
Content is aligned to these strands; the activity is a supporting resource, not a verbatim standard statement:
Texas TEKS · Social Studies (Gr 8, U.S. History): analyze causes of the American Revolution, including mercantilism and lack of representation.
Texas TEKS · Social Studies skills (Gr 6–8): identify cause-and-effect relationships and sequence events chronologically.
Common Core ELA/Literacy · RH.6–8.3 & RH.6–8.5: analyze how events unfold in sequence and describe text structure (cause/effect).
Reasoning habit: distinguishing supported conclusions from unsupported guesses ("prove it from the clue").
💡 Teacher tip: The "warm summer" decoy is the correlation-vs-causation lesson: something happening at the same time is not a cause. The final sort also asks students to reject the Declaration as a "cause" — it was an effect.