The American Revolution and Constitution: Short Nonfiction for American History (Comprehension Toolkit) Illustrated Edition

Our homeschool curriculum has a history/reading/writing component that begins at ancient history (Sumerians) and continues through modern times over about 3 years, then starts over. We are just starting the 2cd time around which is perfect for our 8 and 9 year olds. But, American history does not show up for a long time and I did not want to wait. American history, especially the Founding Fathers and Constitution, is too important to study only every few years. So I decided to include an American History component every Friday. I use this book as a basis and add historical fiction as we go. The Rush Revere series by Rush Limbaugh is excellent as it starts with the first Americans to come from England and how they created a basic government. There are other books that deal with Native Americans, colonial life, the movement westward etc, that can be used to augment to this book. I am very happy with it.

This is an exemplary collection of short-passage texts that directly support learning about the American Revolution. It includes a rich collection of primary source documents and a strong collection of key lesson designs to directly support learning history and supporting Common Core instruction. I am no longer hunter through a variety of other books, websites, or odd collections of teacher's books to find the ideal article. What I also like about this book is that font size is still kid-friendly and has room for annotations. This is key for allowing for interactive reading. Once purchased, there is a downloadable PDF file from Heinemann. This makes it easy to send quality PDFs off to print if your district has a digital print office. No longer do have to try to photocopy out of a book, it is ready for the 21st Century!

Great book. The reading level is VERY high, over 1200 Lexile points, but plenty of good reading. Sadly, no activities.

I bought this resource to supplement my TCI text and because I needed more short texts for my 8th grade students to interact with. This is an expensive purchase and although the texts are solid, the organization of the book and accessibility of the lesson materials is not great. There is no quick, go-to matrix that shows what lesson can be used with which text and the student materials for the lessons like graphic organizers are not reproducible in the book or online PDF from Heinemann. Disappointed, but will use because of the cost.