With much thoughts and reviews, I decided to try Our Star-Spangled Story Curriculum from Notgrass. I have kiddos from 1st grade to 4th grade, and with one boy inclined to lose attention easily, I wanted to choose a curriculum that is simple and yet comprehensive, interesting, and engaging. Moreover, Notgrass has Christian worldview incorporated in the textbook, which we wanted to see in teaching U.S. history.
From the description from Notgrass, “Our Star-Spangled Story is a one-year American history and literature course designed for students in grades 1-4. It combines the flexibility and richness of a unit study with the simplicity of a textbook-based approach to history.” There are 30 units with three lessons in each unit that can be taught in a week.
Each lesson begins with story-based text information with additional activities listed at the end. Each activity incorporates literature, songs and poems, geography, and art, and each unit has a project that reinforces what kids learned. I do love reinforcing what kids learned through books, music, geography, and arts & crafts.
Notebook Journaling
I added History and History Timeline Notebook by the School Nest to reinforce kids learning through notebook journaling. Kids will work on the lesson activity and put them inside their history notebook and write what they learned in each lesson.
Recommended Literatures
The curriculum chooses eight literature titles to complement the lessons in OSSS, so kids can enjoy reading them. If you have a 2nd or 3rd grader who loves to read like our second daughter, you can assign the reading, but as we also have a 4th grader who would rather choose to listen and 1st grade who the books were too hard to read on her own, we choose to do a read-aloud one by one.
See the following literature titles they recommend:
* Benjamin West and His Cat Grimalkin by Marguerite Henry (Unit 1-4)
* Toliver’s Secret by Esther Wood Brady (Units 5-9)
* Freedom Crossing by Margaret Goff Clark (Units 10-12)
* Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Units 13-15)
* Mountain Born by Elizabeth Yates (Units 16-18)
* Emily’s Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary (Units 19-22)
* The Year of Miss Agnes by Kirkpatrick Hill (Units 23-26)
* Katy by Mary Evely Notgrass (Units 27-30)
Additional Reading Recommendations
I thought Leif The Lucky, Columbus, Pocahontas, Benjamin Franklin Abraham Lincoln by Ingri & Edgar Parin D’Aulaire would go perfectly. For example, Leif the Lucky would fit well with Unit 1 Lesson 1 which it talks about Vikings Sailing West just before the year 900. You can purchase or borrow them from a local library which we did and read to the kids for read-aloud. A side note: the D’Aulaire Collection by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire is just amazing.
The book can be quite long, so I printed coloring pages that are related to the book and let the kids color while I read to them. Kids tend to lose attention because the book is a bit long.
Projects
There is a project that is at the end of each unit, and here are some of the pictures that our kids made from Unit 1. Unit 1 project is making Puebloan pottery out of flour and salt and baking them in a conventional oven. Our kids painted theirs at the end and added some sparkles as they had them from a previous art project. Kids also tried to create the imaginary “Seven Cities of Gold” from Lesson 3, but it rather looks like the Wyckoff house in Unit 2, Lesson 5 somehow.
I love seeing Christian integration and engaging stories with additional comprehensive questions, activities, folk songs, timeline work, and projects. The curriculum is not written in personal living book style but written as stories of people living in that period of time. For some units like the story of the Pilgrims and American Revolutionary War and others, I am supplementing with unit studies, living books, and more activities and works in order to teach and involve kids. They seem to enjoy the Revolutionary War unit that I made which I will be sharing more.
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