America the Beautiful by Charlene Notgrass is a one-year American history, geography, and literature course designed for students in grades 5-8. It combines the flexibility and richness of a unit study with the simplicity of a textbook-based approach to history. Daily lessons guide your child chronologically through American history, highlighting key events, people, and places.
We recommend ten works of literature that complement the lessons in America the Beautiful. These books are not essential for understanding the lessons, but each one adds a valuable perspective on a different time period.
Your middle-school student can read the books on their own, or you can use them as family read alouds. Five books go along with America the Beautiful Part 1 and five books with Part 2.
Growing Up Dakota by Charles Eastman (Units 2-5)
Amos Fortune: Free Man by Elizabeth Yates (Units 6-7)
Brady by Jean Fritz (Units 9-10)
Bound for Oregon by Jean Van Leeuwen (Units 12-13)
Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt (Units 14-15)
Little Town on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Units 16-17)
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor (Units 19-20)
Blue Willow by Doris Gates (Units 21-22)
Homer Price by Robert McCloskey (Unit 25)
Katy’s Box by Mary Evelyn Notgrass McCurdy (Units 29-30)
Newly revised, this updated edition of America the Beautiful retains everything that made it a favorite to Christian homeschoolers. From its well-organized, user-friendly approach to the vivid images and engaging text, history is brought alive to the reader. History is only the beginning of what this well-planned Notgrass curriculum has to offer. The history is there, of course, in two large (nearly 600 pgs each) hardcover Texts. Part 1 takes the reader from the Native American nations (excellent coverage, by the way) through Reconstruction; Part 2 covers from the late 1800s to the present. Divided into daily lessons (150) and grouped into weekly units (30), the engaging text is written for students to read independently. If you’re emphasizing America’s beauty, it helps to have full-color pictures among the carefully selected artwork, and they do!
Each unit is divided into five lessons. Each of the five lessons has a different focus: Our American Story, God’s Wonder, An American Landmark, An American Biography and Daily Life. Each lesson concludes with a list of activities. Activities may include “thinking biblically” (Scripture copywork or Bible study), vocabulary, map study, literature suggestion, We the People readings, creative writing, timeline work, and a family activity (more about these later). Each lesson also includes optional assignments for the Student Workbook or the Lesson Review book. If this sounds like a lot, keep in mind that this course only really needs a little additional grammar study to be social studies, Bible, and language arts all in one.
The Curriculum Package includes the two texts mentioned above as well as We the People, Answer Key and Literature Guide, along with the Maps and the Timeline books (six books total). The original source reader that accompanies each Notgrass course is one of my favorite parts. We the People provides the same variety books and stories, newspaper articles, documents, poems, journals, memoirs and biographies, speeches, letters, and songs as their other courses, and skimming through it took me for a trip down memory lane and long-ago classroom recitations. It’s obvious that creative planning went into the family activities provided for each unit, for example: Family Commemorative Coins, a Cupcake Factory, an Erie Canal diorama, and a Liberty Bell mosaic give an idea of the breadth of projects.
