Written for a 4th to 6th grade audience, this 36 week course is published by Master Books. It consists of two books; the Student Textbook and Teacher Guide.
The Student Textbook is a 296 page paperback. It boasts a whopping 34 chapters. Each chapter focuses on a person and related events. For instance, chapters 3 and 4 focus on Benjamin Franklin. Chapter 3 is called The Making of a Man and chapter 4 is The Great Statesman. Some of the names, like Daniel Boone, John Hancock, and Paul Revere are very well known. You'll also study less commonly covered names like Caesar Rodney, George Rogers Clark, and John Sevier. Several chapters are devoted specifically to women and black patriots.
The textbook also begins with How to Use This Book and Who is Uncle Rick? sections. If you are at all familiar with Character Concepts, you will probably know about the terrific Uncle Rick audios. Access to a download of free historical audio files, read by "Uncle Rick" Boyer, is included with the Student Textbook, which is a great addition to the curriculum. I've found that my kids listen better when we are in the car than when we are at the kitchen table, so we save the lesson's audio for a time when we are traveling. At the end of the textbook, is a Bibliography and the extensive Endnotes for each chapter.
The daily readings show how our country was founded on Christian values, introducing students to over two dozen American heroes, using a narrative approach. There are no long lists of dates to memorize.
The Student Textbook retails for $34.99.
The 114 page, soft cover Teacher Guide is bound and three-hole punched. In it, you'll find a detailed suggested daily schedule for each unit, laid out in weekly increments, for five days each week. Suggestions are made for a four day alternative schedule. We homeschool year round, so we can easily take longer than a week for each chapter by following the schedule and just doing the "next thing" regardless of the day of the week.
Reproducible weekly worksheets, quarterly quizzes, activities, and answer keys are all included in this guide. Copyright allows for permission to copy reproducible pages for classes/families of ten or fewer students. The recommended resources for each lesson include audios (some of which are included in the Uncle Rick download), and books (some of which are other Notgrass publications).
The suggested daily schedule is also a handy checklist to track hours (for those of you who need to do that), a check box to tick when the lesson is complete, and a place to record your student(s) grade. I'm not required to count hours/track dates, so I used this space to write the related resources. I tracked audios, pages from Profiles of Valor, also by Marilyn Bower with Grace Tumas, and For You They Signed by Marilyn Boyer. There is an extensive list of books by various authors in the back of the guide. Some are all related to the lessons and some just certain chapters are noted.
The Teacher Guide retails for $14.99.
Lessons take approximately 30-45 minutes. For three days, we start with the daily reading from the Student Worktext which ends at a specific point listed in the Teacher Guide. The reading sections are just a few pages long, so no one has to try to absorb scads of information in one sitting. The pages have extra information in the margins, which is presented as text, photos, maps, and quotes. These are not overly busy and will not tire the eyes. Some of the artwork is in full color and really shows a snapshot of life in the American Revolution time frame.
There are questions to answer based on that reading exercise each day. There are fewer than twenty questions for most of the chapters. On the fourth day, you or your students choose a project to complete. Projects can be drawing pictures or maps, science experiments, writing assignments, and more. Only one project is required for the week, but another project from the quarter will be completed during the review weeks. The fifth and final day is for a chapter test and related audio. Every nine weeks, there is a quarterly quiz in addition to the chapter test. At the end of both semesters, there is a week spent reviewing everything covered to that point. That's how 34 chapters becomes a 36 week course.
Xav loves the hands-on options for the projects. He will generally choose those, especially if they are sciencey, when that is an option. Mal especially struggles a lot with writing and reading comprehension, so we just discuss the questions and I show the punks how to find the answers in the reading section. When we are captive in the car and busy bodies need to be more still, they enjoy engaging their listening skills and are entertained and educated through the audios. This program, while it does involve reading daily, offers plenty of options for most kinds of learners.
