American History Collection Complete

I have finally finished curating, creating, and organizing nearly 100 lesson sets for our United States history page.  Beginning with the early colonization on the east coast and ending with Westward Expansion, our American history lessons are somewhat chronological and allow teachers to pick and choose which parts they wish to use.  If you are an educator with specific standards and objectives to cover, you may freely use this collection, omit what you want for your own program, supplement with your own materials and thoughts, or leave it right where it is.

Cultivating America is something that exemplifies my ​teaching style.  Some might think the materials are vague. That is by design.  I will never be that master teacher who claims to have all the answers, and I will not be the guy who writes you a script to follow with your students.  While many are deficient in the content, I knew I needed to provide some guidance, but I will not tell you how to teach it. Each educator must add her own personality to the lessons.

When I began putting together these lessons, crossing curricular boundaries, and molding them to make them accessible to fourth graders, I struggled to find a title for it all.  I wanted it to be something unique and yet hearken to Americana in some way.  I started with "These United States", thinking about what Ben Gates says in National Treasure about when people started saying The United States instead.  After a while, thinking the title needed more action, it became "Uniting the States".  That, after all, was what the founders were doing.  That title, however, just seems awkward coming out of the mouth.  Neither title sounded like something I would create.

To capture the entire 200+ years, I needed something more descriptive.  So I started thinking.  Words like growing and planting came to mind.  Growing the USA?  Planting the United States.  Birthing a Nation?  Starting? Beginning?  That's when the whole thing became ​Cultivating America.  I realized that it is about more than the seed and the vision.  It was about the hard work, the dirty toiling, and the weeds (so many weeds!).  Figuratively, it's about drought and flood, pestilence, heat stroke, and fertilizer (lots of fertilizer!).  It's about burning and plowing, raking, bailing, harvesting, winnowing, and threshing.  It's about packaging, delivering, and consumption.

There is acknowledgment about American history here - the acknowledgment of mistakes and unfulfilled promises, backroom politics, racist legislation, and the instigation of violence.

There is a focus on looking for the details, looking at the forest and the trees - appreciating the grandeur and the beauty of a vista while then investigating the components that make it work.  This is an excellent start to teaching students how to write an organized paragraph.

There are chances to tell the real stories - more compelling than the latest juvenile fiction and more disgusting than recent horror movies.  Here are characters who are full of depth, flaw, vision, and heritage.  Here are plots with sharp edges and hairpin twists.  Here is the chance to teach figurative language, inference, theme, and finding main idea and details.

There is organization to it.  Here is your chance to teach cause and effect, chronology, problems and solutions, and more.  You need to teach text structure?  Here you go.

Here you find economy, politics, geography, and history, but there is also mathematics, reading, science, writing, listening, and speaking.  For good measure, I threw in music, physical activity, and visual art.

There is simple observation and data collection to high-order thinking skills with all kinds of analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and development.

There are opportunities to ask questions, starting with What do you notice? and ending with What do you wonder? My students learn quickly to start with what they already know (which could be very little) and put the rest together.  Sometimes the lessons leave them with more curiosity than they entered the classroom with.

There is variety, sometimes giving teams a chance to work together and wrestle with the material.  Also here are entertaining content delivery, sometimes heavy with drama, but many times with an infusion of humor.

There is an intentional focus on character and citizenship.  Actions have consequences.  Actions have equal and opposite reactions.  Reactions can take a relationship in multiple directions.  In our class, we do not shy away from meeting the needs of children on a daily basis, stopping any academics that may be expected to deal with issues that arise.  We know that behavior and relationships must be in place before the "three Rs".  At the same time, we can also infuse these U.S. history lessons with proactive messages to quell the problems before they arise.

Finally, these lesson sets are a demonstration that it takes hard work to achieve.  If that is true in the revolutionary era, it is certainly true in the 21st century.  As we strive toward the American Dream, as we continue to pursue happiness, and as we build upon the founders' attempts to make a more perfect union, let us never forget that opportunity does not knock very loudly upon pillows.  We must stand, dust ourselves, and lean forward into the winds of resistance.  The lessons here teach students that dirty fingernails, winded breathing, and aromatic perspiration are sometimes the means by which we achieve.

My hope is that I am not the only one who uses the material collected on our Cultivating America page, but even if I am, I have grown and learned in putting it together, and its completion feels pretty nice.  I will continue to add to and change the materials here, even now, into the fourth decade of my stay in the profession.