Americas Heritage

America’s Heritage – an adventure in liberty is another great resource to use for homeschooling History and it is free! I received a review copy of this disk and was pleasantly surprised. Although this curriculum/resource is intended for use by public school teachers, it can easily be used by homeschool parents too.

The disk was developed by the Houston Independent School District with the McNair foundation and the American Heritage Foundation. The documents on the disk are all in pdf format and easy to read.

There are three different books on this disk. One is for Elementary (in English or Spanish), one for Middle school age, and one for High School age students. All books are arranged by unit and theme. The themes they are trying to encourage are freedom, unity, progress and responsibility. Each level uses American documents and holidays to expound on these themes.

The books for the younger 2 levels cover 1776-2000 AD and the High school book covers 1622-2000 AD. They are organized by month from September through May and suggest using 1-2 units per month.

In each unit it tells you the purpose of the unit, the time it will take, the materials you will need and any preparation you need to do before you start. Although some of the activities involve groups of students, you can easily adapt these to a homeschooling family.

I like the fact that the activities are multi-sensory in most cases. They utilize role playing, puppets, cutting up words and phrases, sign language and others. I believe that children learn much more when they use more of their senses. Your children should remember better what they study here if you use these hands on activities.

The books use various national holidays, American symbols and  historical documents to teach the themes mentioned above. I like this course and think that it is a valid resource that homeschoolers should consider for teaching about America’s heritage.

You can order and receive this CD with lesson plans for FREE at http://americanheritage.org/contact_us.html  To read more about this resource and the organizations who put it together, you can go to their home page at American Heritage.

As a member of the Homeschool Crew, I was given this product to review. I was not paid for this post and do not have to return the product to the vendor.  The opinions expressed in this post are those of the blog owner (me).