The Best Elementary Homeschool History Textbook

Spoiler alert, its Rad American History A-Z by Kate Schatz & Miriam Klein Stahl

Hello! Hi again! Dang, y’all, it’s been two years since I last wrote a blog post here. In the meantime, I’ve been posting weekly wrap-ups for our ongoing Seeds of Change American history classes over in our Facebook group. But Facebook is, as we know, not great, and so we’re finally taking the leap and moving out. I’ll be writing recap posts with resources for each of our weekly lessons here instead, and we’ll be sharing more stuff and exclusive freebies in our monthly-ish newsletter, which you can sign up for here. We are truly so happy with the book and lesson format we’ve landed on this year, and my future posts are going to go through what we did one chapter at a time, so I wanted to take a minute to tell you how we got here.

We’ve learned a lot in our almost-three years of teaching American history to elementary students. In our first year, we used a random hodgepodge of books to guide our weekly lessons. Much of the year was centered around readings from and lessons inspired by An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Stamped, and A Young People’s History of the United States (links to all the books and websites we used in that first semester are available in this post). We also based whole units off of Nathan Hale’s graphic novels and other children’s books. But while these are all definitely wonderful resources, it was rough cobbling together a curriculum with so many random materials. We jumped around a lot in topic and style and the year didn’t feel cohesive. Also, the readings were often too advanced for our younger learners and we had to do a lot of modifications. Some stuff worked really well though. For example, we had a myth-busting activity in almost every lesson where we’d show the kids a popular kiddie YouTube video or book or song that was about the topic we had just studied and they got to pick it apart for historical inaccuracies- it was a big hit (click through to those links if you dare!). We also landed on the idea of introducing an art prompt or activity that kids could get started working on right away, while Helen did the day’s read aloud. When the school year ended and Helen and I were deciding what to do for the following year, we decided to keep the art activities and the myth-busting, but we wanted to use just one book for the whole school year to help ease our planning work and to make the curriculum feel more cohesive.

Stamped (For Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You came out in May of 2021 as we were wrapping up our first year and we were thrilled. Here was a book that was written for our grade levels, covered a wide swath of history (from the 15th century to the present) and was created by a brilliant team of writers and illustrators. We made it our textbook for the 2021-22 school year and went through one chapter a week, with art activities and myth-busting activities and expanded info on each chapter’s topic. Some weeks it really felt like we nailed it. For chapter four, “Flawed Founding Fathers” we read about Thomas Jefferson, and how the same man who wrote “all men are created equal” spent his whole life enslaving (more than six hundred) people. Our lesson was created with the goal not to demonize people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, but not to glorify them either. We wanted to take a multi-faceted view of their lives and work, the good parts and the bad parts. We used this discussion as a springboard to talk about “patriotic education” and what it means to be patriotic, because some people only want kids to learn the good things about our founding fathers and our country, and to have them never be exposed to the bad parts. Our art project, shown below, was meant to drive home the point that the bad parts of our history are part of the whole picture, and just looking at the good half means you’re missing some really important understanding. So we invited the kids to fold a piece of paper and draw two halves of the same image- the good and the bad, but with the bad part covered up by the fold until you peel back the paper and take in the whole image. The kids came up with some truly fantastic drawings- for example, a chocolate bar that looked delicious until you exposed that half of it was rotten and melted.

I actually have the whole year of lessons and activities in a draft in Canva, and I had the intention of doing the work to edit it for publication in our store and on TPT, because I think it’s a great book and I think it’s important for kids to learn this history, but something held me back. Thinking about it more, I think it’s that spending the full year on the history of racism in America is super depressing. Especially toward the end of the book, you’re reading about Emmett Till, the church bombing in Birmingham, the assassinations of Malcolm X and MLK, and more, and for some of our kids, it became too much. This is an area I really struggle with- if Black children like Ruby Bridges had to endure this trauma, shouldn’t we, at a minimum, be willing to teach our kids about it? I think the difference is cramming all of this awful stuff into one elementary curriculum, so that every week it is more relentless bad news. The conclusion I came to was that it would be better to take a more long-term approach to this, with lessons worked in throughout the year(s), with breaks for empowering stories in between. That idea, the focus on people who have made positive change in the world, was our guiding light in the selection of our history book for class this year.

We read through so many possible contenders for our 2022-23 textbook. We wanted a book that would be good for a weekly read-aloud appropriate for our mixed age elementary group (we have kids as young as 5 and as old as 12 in our group!), one that balanced the hard-to-read history with more light-hearted stories, and one that inspired us in our lesson planning. When we read Rad American History A-Z by Kate Schatz & Miriam Klein Stahl, we knew we’d found the one. First, check out the topics covered:

The Table of Contents for Rad American History A-Z. A is for Alcatraz - The Indian Occupation of 1969, B is for #BlackLivesMatter, C is for Combahee River Raid, D is for Declaration of Sentiments, E is for Earth First!, F is for Federal Theatre Project, G is for Great Law of Peace - The Iroquois Constitution, H is for Hull House, I is for Independent Living - Disability Rights, J is for Jazz, K is for Korematsu v. United States, L is for Libraries - The Freedom to Read, M is for March!
N is for No Nukes!, O is for Our Bodies, Ourselves, P is for Pop Art, Q is for Quilts, R is for Riot Grrrl, S is for Stonewall, T is for Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, U is for United Farm Workers, V is for Voting Rights, W is for Witches, X is for the radical histories that didn't get recorded, Y is for Youth Climate Movement, Z is for Zuccotti Park - The Occupy Movement

Look at the variety! It’s a great mix of familiar and unfamiliar topics (unfamiliar for me, anyway). It jumps around in history, so every week feels fresh and exciting, and it highlights the stories of a diverse set of historically marginalized communities. So we’re learning stories about Black, LGBTQ, Indigenous, AAPI, Disabled people and others who fought for their rights all in the same curriculum. And the writing is SO GOOD. There have been topics (cough Declaration of Sentiments cough), where I was sure it was going to be boring and it was actually entertaining and inspiring and taught me so much I didn’t know (and my BA is in American History!). There were other topics that I thought I was well-versed in where I learned new and interesting details. For example, we spent a class period learning about the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII last year, and I had still never heard this aspect of the story- that Fred Korematsu’s daughter, Karen, didn’t learn about her father’s case against the United States until a fellow student did a presentation on it in her high school history class!

An image of the first page of the K is for Korematsu v. United States chapter in Rad American History A-Z

The book highlights 26+ incredible stories of everyday people working to make the world a better place. We reasoned that spending a year studying these movements would show our students that progress is achieved when people organize and fight for it, and that working together we have the power to make big changes. But would this book, as interesting and wonderful as it was, be suitable as the foundation of our history studies for the year? Traditional history curriculums move chronologically through a timeline, covering all of the biggest historical moments. But this methodology, by virtue of its breadth, means that you likely won’t have time to get too far into the details that make any given story interesting. Nor will you have the opportunity to highlight the important stories that state and national standards often overlook. But we’re homeschoolers! So we get to dream up an alternative approach, implement it, and see if it works. After much thought, we decided that we wanted our history class to accomplish two things: 1) show kids that everyday people, working together, have the power to make change and 2) give the kids opportunities in every class to practice being creative, critical thinkers and problem solvers. Rad American History A-Z would help us work toward both of these goals.

As I write this, we are about to begin our second semester. We covered chapters A-K in the fall and will do the rest, with a special bonus lesson for MLK Day, in the months to come. I am so proud of the lessons we created to go with this fantastic book. I’m happy to report that our students have wowed us with their creative solutions to the prompts and their thoughtful discussions of each chapter. Future posts on this blog will go through the lessons, one chapter (letter) at a time, should you wish to recreate these lessons with your own students, and our curriculum will be for sale in our mint and bloom store and on TPT soon, if you’d like to save yourself some work and use the handouts we created to go with each lesson. I hope I’ve inspired you to check out Rad American History A-Z!