This guide will point you towards all the resources we recommend for teaching history at each grade level. This includes several complete courses we’ve created ourselves, which are available free of charge from the links below. We are in the process of filling this page with our full suggestions for a PK-12 history curriculum, so keep checking back for more.
This is an Advanced, College-Prep Curriculum
We suggest that a goal of any homeschool student should be to acquire one year of college history credits before graduating high school (typically, through either an AP or CLEP examination). In particular, we have designed this curriculum with the expectation that students who use our materials will take the AP United States History test prior to graduating high school. For this reason, you should consider this a guide to an honors-track history curriculum.
By setting a clear end goal for our curriculum, we are able to introducing elements of important AP-level concepts at relatively early grade levels. For example, our 8th grade course (Journey Into the Foundations of America) includes a number of “document studies” in which we ask students to write essays about various historical documents. These essays help students develop some of the skills they will later need when answering the infamous “document-based questions” that appear in the AP history exams. Our general strategy is to slowly introduce AP-like questions into each grade level, so that students can gradually acclimate to the format of the test.
We Respect Your Time
Although this is an advanced curriculum, it isn’t meant to be tedious. There are no pointless busywork assignments. Whenever we ask questions in our courses, we first carefully consider whether they will genuinely help students develop their understanding of the past. We use questions and assignments to highlight the most important points of history, not to quiz students on minor trivia.
We Believe Parents Should Instill Ideologies, Not Textbooks
We are greatly disturbed by the extent to which history education has become politicized in recent years. Our curriculum is not intended to promote any particular religion or modern political ideology. When recommending external resources, we seriously examine whether they express bias in these matters, and will clearly indicate if we observe any minor ways in which they deviate from neutrality.
Curriculum Summary
We have currently created complete courses for 6th-8th grade, with more being in-progress. We will also be adding guides for various external resources that we recommend using for other grade levels.
6th Grade: World History I
Our free World History course spans two grade levels worth of material in an in-depth survey of the history of humanity. Part I covers the history of the Eastern Hemisphere from the bronze age up to the first transatlantic voyage of Columbus. It includes more than 60 hours of instructional videos and a workbook of over 100 pages. Although we recommend beginning World History I in 6th grade, it covers material at a sufficiently advanced level that it could alternatively be introduced in 7th or 8th grade.
7th Grade: World History II
Part II of our World History course begins with the early history of the Western Hemisphere, and then proceeds with the history of the entire world from the first transatlantic voyage of Columbus to the present time. Much like Part I, it includes more than 60 hours of instructional videos and a workbook of more than 100 pages.
8th Grade: Journey Into the Foundations of America
We are deeply passionate about the need for high-quality materials to teach American history and civics, and created Journey Into the Foundations of America in order to provide our own children an advanced education in these subjects. It is available as a free download from our website, and covers American history from the earliest European explorations of the Americas to the year 1914. We are currently developing a follow-up, titled Journey Into Pax Americana, which will be a YouTube-based curriculum (similar to our World History course) and will cover the history of the world from 1914 to the present.