America’s Story Volume 1 Set teaches upper elementary homeschool students (grades 3-6) the amazing history of the United States of America from the ancient Americas to the 1850s. This full-color history curriculum features an engaging narrative, beautiful historic illustrations, photographs, maps, and more to help your student explore the infancy of our country through the founding of our great nation, while catching glimpses of the Founding Fathers. This American history homeschool course consists of 28 chapters and five built-in reviews, making it easy to finish in one school year.
Includes the Student Guide and Teacher Guide for America’s Story Volume 1.
The Student Books are amazing. Full of colorful artwork and photos as well as black & white illustrations, vocabulary tidbits, maps, and biographical sketches, it is skillfully formatted into an appealing and engaging text. Each of the 28 chapters (i.e. weekly lessons) have text interspersed with Narration Breaks (place to stop and recount orally the information that has been covered) and questions: “Ready to Explore” (America’s Story). Each chapter ends with a two-page photo montage (a feature I love) that pertains to the chapter’s focus. For instance, there is a collection of Native American dwellings each with short informational captions in America’s Story.
The Teacher Guide is a combination book. It is part teacher book, with some course instructional information, detailed daily lesson plans, an overview of the activities built into the student worksheets, teaching tips for struggling learners, supply lists, suggestions for special projects, and answers for student worksheets. Information for the teacher (about 10% of the book) includes a section on the importance of narration and words of encouragement from the publisher. The remainder of the book is student worksheets (which are reproducible for your own homeschooling family). These worksheets provide the heart of a student’s journal to accompany the course. Very nicely designed and well-illustrated, there are daily front-and-back worksheets. These are similar but appropriately different for each age level between the two series. The whole TG is three-hole punched, and for the record, there are no tests in either series.
America’s Story worksheets include Draw-Write pages (journaling lines, space for sketching, copywork), Mini-Project pages (cut & glue projects), Written Narration pages, Timeline pages (cards for each chapter with space for students to create their own timeline), a Special Prayer Book (a cut apart book for writing a weekly prayer for his/her country), and Artist Study (quick introduction to an artist with a variety of related art activities). Mapwork and vocabulary study are also a featured part of these pages.
