Description
A 36-Week Schedule for Your Year-Long Later American History Study
Target Age Group: Grades 4th to 8th
Type of Resource: Non-Consumable
The “American Culture” Guide
The “American Culture” Guide schedules a variety of well-illustrated history and culture books in this easy to read guide. The schedule is based on a 4-day week, which leaves one day free for extracurricular studies, field trips, co-op, doctor appointments, trips to the grocery store, or whatever else in your “real life.”
You’ll love the clear weekly schedules and helps in this guide. The guide also includes activity ideas, advice on teaching and grading student work using Charlotte Mason ideals, website links, as well as a rating system and supply lists for activities and experiments.
This guide pulls together the resources to study several time periods in later American history beginning with the terrible conflict of the Civil War. After walking through the hardships of this time, students will head west to discover how rapidly it is settling after Reconstruction. Railroads are being laid down, bridges put up, homesteads built on the prairies, and towns thrown up along railway lines. In between, students will see for themselves the daily challenges of the lonely pioneer, the dangerous life of cattle ranchers, and the struggle for survival faced by Native American tribes.
Then the rest of American history unfolds: immigrants arrive in the east to help along American industrialization and the growth of eastern cities where skyscrapers rise and subways descend. They’ll follow along as the twenties roar, the stock market crashes, and two world wars rage. Then they’ll see how modern America was shaped by the 1950’s, the issue of civil rights, the Vietnam conflict and the Cold War, and the amazing technology advances of the Information Revolution.
The focus of this program is on students learning the unfolding story of America, so the resources this guide schedules allows students to be on hand for the most important events as they happened, or meet influential Americans who changed history. The guide offers many different activities with instructions that are “Open & Go!” and also schedules others from the resource set that make it easy to keep students busy with little to no prep.
Up Close in This Guide
- A 36-week, 4-day schedule is laid out clearly in a grid-style on just one page
- Introductory material helps you mentor and “learn together” with your student
- Supply lists and other helps make planning quick and painless
- Narration ideas in the front of the guide help you prompt your student through the year
- Weekly schedule page reduces your paperwork and is easy to follow, with clear notes
- Resources offer a focus on activities that are “Open & Go!”
- Rating systems for activities help you find the ones you want!
- Independent study schedules eliminate writing out homework lists
- 100 Timeline Cards and games provide fun drill to retain key events
- Website and DVD suggestions take your family inside America’s later history
- Above all, WP offers a practical, “Can-Do-and-Want-To-Do!” approach
Schooling a Range of Ages
If you have a large range of students you’d like to study American history, you may want to consider using the All-American 2 program, which was designed so your family can complete later American history together with adjustment. The All-American 2 Set brings together some of the best resources from the two programs American Story 2 and American Culture. You’ll want to keep in mind that some of the resources may not connect with your youngest students, though older students can help and mentor younger ones along the way, too. Some parents choose instead to purchase the two sets separately so that older students complete American Culture while younger family members work through American Story 2. If you have several students at the youngest end, you may be better off using the two programs instead of just the one All-American 2 set.
