American Heritage Education Foundation
The American Heritage Education Foundation is a non-profit organization “dedicated to the understanding and teaching of America's factual and philosophical heritage to promote constructive citizenship and Freedom, Unity, Progress, and Responsibility among our students and citizens.” To further this goal, they provide free educational material focusing on America’s historical legacy. The lesson plans they offer are divided by age levels – elementary, middle school, and high school.
Since my daughter is 5 years old I focused on the elementary lesson plans. The first unit, American Heritage Themes, discusses the ideas of freedom, progress, responsibility, and unity. Each of the following units spotlights one or two of those themes. The units include:
- Colonial America
- The Declaration of Independence
- A Famous Signature
- George Washington
- The U. S. Presidents
- The Great Seal
- The History of Thanksgiving Day
- The United States Flag
- The Star-Spangled Banner
- The National Motto
- Statue of Liberty
- The Pledge of Allegiance and Creed
- America the Beautiful
- What is an American?
Each unit begins with an overview page highlighting the lesson’s purpose, objective, and theme, as well as listing materials needed and preparation required. The pages following the overview include a list of classroom activities ranging from making a Statue of Liberty puppet to playing a game about independence. Some lessons also include worksheets or puzzles for the children to complete, though I find the quality of many of the worksheets lacking.
The lesson plans are geared to a classroom setting so homeschooler’s will have to sift through the 184 pages of teacher’s materials to find things suitable for use on a smaller scale. I found some interesting activities but since I only have one child many of them wouldn’t work well in our situation. I do think it could make an interesting unit study if you added interesting books to each unit and it’s something I’m considering when TJ is a bit older.
This material is provided for free (CD or PDF download) from the American Heritage Education Foundation. If you’re interested in reading how other homeschool families used this product you can check out the homeschool crew blog.
I haven’t done a
On the weekend I'll sit down and fill out what we'll be doing for the week, using a simple 5-column chart with 12 boxes for each day. I flip through my teacher’s manuals or TJ’s workbooks to make sure I know what is coming up for the week and I pull out the other worksheets, copywork pages, etc. that we’ll need. TJ goes through our index card file box (more about this later) and picks out the "fun" stuff she wants to include during the week. I fit them into the chart along with our regular schoolwork and then we start getting things ready. All of TJ's daily skill subjects - math, spelling, writing, Bible, grammar, French, and morning drill and recitation go into separate magazine holder's on a narrow bookshelf in our dining room. I don’t refill these boxes each day – we just leave all teacher’s manuals, workbooks, and worksheets inside. If something doesn’t fit (binders, etc.), they sit on the shelf beside the appropriate box and are pulled out when they are needed.
All the other work – geography, science, music, reading, etc. and all the “fun” things, go in a plastic six-drawer rolling cart (well, it used to roll, then I took the wheels off :) ). The items in these drawers vary. The top drawer is used to hold our phonics primer and never gets switched out for anything else. The same goes for the bottom drawers. The last box holds our weekly science experiment (I get everything put in there on the weekend so it’s ready to go), and the drawer above that holds our geography supplies (books, maps, and project stuff), and is only used once a week. The remaining three drawers are the only three that I have to refill each evening.
On the top of the plastic tower I keep an index card box with our
The index card box holds all our activity cards and the numbers for the schedule strip. I also use it to hold ideas for the workboxes. When I come across a new idea I write it on an index card and file it in the box under the specific subject the idea fits under. The activity cards are also filed according to subject.







