American Heritage Education Foundation {Review}

I received a CD-rom from American Heritage Education Foundation in the mail recently to review and was a little puzzled at first about what exactly it was. After reading through the information that came along with the CD, I discovered that I had a wonderful little tool in my hands ~ it was actually a FULL American history curriculum for grades K-12.

You want to know the best part? It is completely FREE. As in, no charge. How wonderful is that?

The Mission of American Heritage Education Foundation {AHEF}

AHEF is a non-profit, non-partisan education foundation 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.

AHEF accomplishes this patriotic mission by writing, producing, and distributing FREE K-12 lesson plans to teachers, students and families in all 50 states and through additional initiatives, programs, and partnerships.

More about the Curriculum

America’s Heritage has full lesson plans and resources for grades K-12 in history and related subjects. It is a curriculum that was developed by teacher and lesson plans are divided into three different age levels: elementary, middle, and high school. The plans can be adjusted and made age appropriate through for different age groups. The creators of the plans also provide any national standard information {NCSS or Core Knowledge Skills} as they relate to the lessons. Although it was originally developed for use in the public school system, it can be easily used in a homeschool setting.

Each lesson focuses on at least one {or more} of the following core themes: freedom, unity, progress, and responsibility. The plans are broken down into three sections which each cover different topics/areas.

Plans for elementary aged children include the following topics:

• Colonial American and the American Revolution
• Declaration of Independence
• George Washington & US presidents
• history of Thanksgiving
• Statue of Liberty
• America the Beautiful

Middle school topics include:

• US Constitution
• Bill of Rights
• Gettysburg Address
• National Motto
• Pledge of Allegiance

High school topics also cover:

• Mayflower Compact
• First Amendment
• American’s Creed
• Federal Flag Code
• National Documents
• Entrepreneurs in history

Each level of curriculum is set up in a similar way and provides the teacher with several different things ~ the purpose of the lesson, the lesson objective, time it takes to teach the lesson, material needed, and any prior preparation that needs to be done ahead of time. Lessons also include extra activities that relate to the lesson like games, copies of documents {such as signatures, the Declaration, Constitution, etc…} and other fun things like theater scripts, puzzles, and puppets.

Find Out More

Did you catch the fact that this is a free resource for everyone? That fact alone should get you hopping over to the page to request a free CD of the curriculum {a $150 value} or you can order it all in a 3-ring binder {$19.50}. Depending on the speed of your internet provider, you can also download the curriculum.

I’m excited to have this as a resource for us to use next year since we’ll be studying early American history ~ and the less planning I have to do and the more resources I have the better!