All American History

If you are using an American history course that doesn't go much beyond who discovered what when; who fought who when, and where; who invented this, who built that, who wrote such and such a poem or novel; stop here for just a minute and let me tell you about a history course that will fill in all those blanks. Each volume is a full year of study in 32 weekly lessons aimed at 5th through 8th grade students. The hardcover student reader reads like a story, emphasizing the social and cul¬tural aspects of American history. The Companion Guide is the Student Activity Book, plus the Teacher's Guide. The Student Activity Book can be accessed online with the code provided in the main text or Reader. It includes exercises, reviews, map work, and study questions. The comprehensive teacher guide contains teaching notes and directions for utilizing both the reader and activity book, answers to all the questions and reviews, games and activities, creative project ideas, timeline strategies, recommended reading lists, family fun activities, and more. 

The optional Junior Digital Download (PDF) adapts the activities and teaching information for elementary students, so students of all levels can study American history together. This digital download is a separate purchase that provides shorter reading assignments, age-appropriate literature study guides, map work, activity pages, folder book projects, puzzles, and notebooking or coloring pages. The Junior Digital Download replaces the Student Companion for those grades. The Student Reader is required.

The reader is not unlike a good story, using plain language, black and white illustrations, and maps to retell the history of America from the earliest explorers of America through to the beginning of the 19th century. Not missing any of the important information found in traditional history texts, students will be drawn into the exploration of history at a much deeper level and in a more diverse way. The author has emphasized the social and cultural aspects of American history to add extra life to the text. Students learn about the clothes people wore, the houses they lived in, the foods they ate, the games they played, the schools they attended and other interesting facts. All these details are so very important to the study of history, though overlooked at times by other history courses. The chapters are well laid out, and all follow the same basic formula. The opening provides a description of the atmosphere in which the events of the chapter occurred, followed by the body of the chapter in which the events are detailed and the stories told, and concluded with a list of ways the events had an impact on America's future.

The digital, downloadable Companion Guide (included with the Reader) is full of exercises, reviews, map work, and study questions. The digital, downloadable teacher's guide/answer key contains teaching notes and directions for utilizing both the reader and activity book, answers to all the questions and reviews, games and activities, creative project ideas, timeline strategies, recommended reading lists, family fun activities, and more. If you want, however, to take the study of American history more seriously and to a deeper level, the teacher's guide also has plenty of options for further study. In fact, while focused mainly on grades five through eight, the teacher's guide also contains suggestions for adapting this history course both for children younger than 5th grade and for high school students, using the course in a family setting, the co-op setting (which was originally how this course came into being), and the Christian school setting. Suffice it to say that this American history course, by Christian author and history teacher Celeste Rakes, is complete, thorough and adaptable to almost any setting a homeschooler would need.

Volume 1 covers the age of European Exploration, early colonization, the American Revolution, and Westward Expansion. Continuing the story of America, Volume 2 picks up at the Civil War, with details of the prelude to the war through to the reconstruction period. From that point, the rest of American history is divided into three eras - the Gilded Age (also known as the Victorian Age), the period of the two world wars and the depression; and finally, the Cold War and the 21st Century.

Although this course was previously made up of three separate items, the new inclusion of the downloadable digital Companion Guide and Teacher's Guide into the Reader makes this course even more usable for families using it as a multi-grade history program!