What are the differences between Our Star-Spangled Story, America the Beautiful, and Exploring America?

Notgrass History offers three separate courses that look at U.S. history in three different ways. All three courses include a book of primary sources. They also incorporate literature and offer a variety of activities for students with different learning styles. All three courses have easy-to-follow instructions, so you don’t have to do any lesson planning. Though there are similarities, each course focuses on different things and is geared to a specific audience.

Our Star-Spangled Story

Our Star-Spangled Story is for students in grades one through four. This curriculum tells the stories of individual people and how they played a role in big events in American history. It celebrates the music that has inspired Americans over the centuries. And it provides a solid understanding of the basic timeline of American history to help students in their more advanced studies.

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America the Beautiful

America the Beautiful is for students in grades five through eight. This curriculum paints a picture of what God created when He made America, while telling about major events that happened here, individuals who lived here, aspects of American culture in various time periods, and landmarks Americans have built. It provides more detail than Our Star-Spangled Story and introduces students to more primary source documents (letters, speeches, and newspaper articles).

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Exploring America

Exploring America, designed specifically for high school students, goes even deeper. Exploring America examines social, political, and religious trends in American history. In addition to teaching students what happened, it helps them to develop a Christian worldview. The primary source documents in American Voices are on a much higher reading level, as are the twelve classic books that the students read. The weekly unit projects in Exploring America are more complex and involve higher-level thinking skills.

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Choosing Curriculum for Your Family

You can use any two or all three of these courses at the same time with children of different ages. All three courses go through American history at roughly the same pace. This chart shows how the units from each curriculum correspond to the others chronologically.

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Please contact us if you have any questions about choosing the right curriculum for your family or getting the most out of Notgrass History.

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