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Monday, November 9, 2009

TOS Homeschool Crew Review - American Heritage Education Foundation





An Introductory paragraph from the American Heritage Education Foundation.
"AHEF is a non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation dedicated to the understanding and teaching of America's factual and philosophical heritage to promote constructive citizenship and Freedom, Unity, Progress, and Responsibility among our students and citizens. AHEF Free K-12 lesson plans to teachers, students, and families in all 50 states..." accomplishes this patriotic mission by writing, producing, and distributing
Did you catch that?  FREE! Free Emoticons This is one product that I am reviewing that every one of my readers can afford!

This product comes as a CD or you can download the lesson plans from the website. The CD includes Elementary lessons, Middle School lessons, High School lessons. The CD and the downloads are the exact same. The lessons are created by and for public schools and some of the activities need a large group. Some of these activities may be adapted to homeschool use and some may not. Some of the activities may be done orally instead of in writing and some of the activities may be skipped altogether. There are a number of choices of activities in each lesson and you may pick and choose what seems best for your family. Since this product was created by a school in Texas and was created for public schools the activities are very "schoolish" and so I skipped or adapted them. But, the topics are worth studying; and even if you don't do them all they may spark your creative juices or be a great addition to an already great education on our government and symbols. 

We are not covering American history at the moment. We are studying the Renaissance and Reformation.  I hope to get to American history later this year or early next year. For now we did a few lessons so we could review this product and we will review or redo the lessons once we get to American History and we will do those we did not cover yet.

The lessons on the CD/download don't really cover a time period in history but themes important to American history like the Declaration, the Constitution, the American Flag, and the Statue of Liberty. On each of the pages for the age brackets you can see a list of the topics included: Elementary, Middle School, High School. Some of the topics/lessons are exactly the same for different lessons, some of the lessons are the same topic but different projects are suggested, and some of the topics are only done in one of the levels. 

We used the middle school and high school lessons. Christopher enjoyed the Declaration Scramble the best of all the activities we did. In this activity the boys were given the whole Declaration and then were given the whole Declaration cut up into paragraphs or parts of paragraphs and they had to put the cut up parts into order. This was fun and familiarized them with our Declaration. Nathan's favorite lesson was the lesson on the American Flag. His favorite part of that lesson was finding and copying a poem about the flag and then drawing a picture to go with it. We also read over the Flag Code for the care and use of the American Flag and we discussed those rules. Then they wrote a one page paper on how and why we should show respect to the flag, why we have a code, and why the code is important. Remember, there are a number of activities for each lesson so you may choose from among them what seems best for your family and you may do one or more for each lesson.

I highly recommend getting the FREE CD. This way you have it saved and won't lose it if your computer should crash, I hope it doesn't, but it was convenient to not have to save it on my computer with my many other homeschool things on there. It is especially good if you have a slow computer, you don't have to bother with waiting for the download to finish. And, since the price is so reasonable... FREE!  you might as well get the CD!

Out of five stars we give American Heritage Education Foundation:
 



I give this product my good value icon:
since it's cost is FREE! $0.00


They also have a binder you can purchase with the lessons already printed out if you are interested in getting it that way but that costs $19.50 per level (includes shipping).

I hope you check out American Heritage Education Foundation

Please check the other reviews by my crew mates to get some other opinions on this
product HERE.

***American Heritage Education Foundation provided me with the free CD so that I could do my review. Though I received these products for free I have given an honest review of them here in this post.   

Debbie

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