Review of We the People: Getting to Know Your Constitution

As my children grow, I am facing the reality that our school time together is drawing to close. Each one of my children have always loved hands on learning and always wanted to continue that no matter their age. There is often a stigma that hands on learning can't happen during middle and high school years and often that is hard to do with the curriculum available today with most being designed with the elementary grades in mind. If your children love hands on learning and unit studies, then you will definitely want to check out today's review product.

Homeschool Legacy has designed a variety of unit studies to aid families who have this same desire as our family. We had the opportunity to try the digital version of We the People: Getting to Know Your Constitution.

We the People: Getting to Know Your Constitution is a Biblically centered curriculum designed as a once a week unit study for grades 4-12.  There is no preparation that needs to be done ahead of time as you are provided with a supply list, daily schedule, and list of library books including the call numbers.

This unit study will take you through 8 weeks of exploring documents and policies of our Founding Fathers and government. Topics covered include the Constitution, our Bill of Rights, the three branches of government, the voting process, the amendments, and our national symbols.
Subjects tackled in this unit study:

• Bible including memorization 
• History including timeline 
• Current Events/Social Studies 
• Geography 
• Art including Art Appreciation 
• Language Arts including research, writing, and vocabulary, independent reading, and read alouds 
• Music 
• Life Skills 
• Drama 
• Also included are many ideas for games including printable sheets to help you make them, documentary suggestions, YouTube links, field trip ideas including virtual field trip ideas with links, and recommended family movies. 

As you can see, this can totally be used as a comprehensive curriculum for history. You can also just use it as an addition to your current curriculum. I always love that flexibility in a homeschool curriculum!

Another bonus - if your children are a part of Boy Scouts or American Heritage Girls, they will also be able to earn several of their badge requirements which are clearly marked for you during the lessons.

How We Use This In Our Homeschool

Each year, we try to focus on a history cycle so for us this year's focus was American History. For this school year, we have tried a new 4 days of regular school approach with 1 day off - Fridays. We call this day Fun Fridays and would save any projects or science experiments for Fridays. Well, that's pretty much how We the People: Getting to Know Your Constitution is set up too! So, we decided to incorporate this unit study on our Fun Fridays. I have had a difficult time coming up with activities to bring our studies together on Fridays so this unit study was the perfect cure for that. The suggested read alouds and literature were added to our daily activities as the schedule suggested. There was no work for me except making sure the necessary supplies and books were in place. All three of my children did this study together - grades 6th, 8th, and 11th and none of them complained about any age or grade inappropriateness but all of my children really enjoy hands on activities. I know some students do not but mine beg for more.

There are so many fun activities included in this unit study and our family had a wonderful time of learning together! I really enjoyed having the digital version because it made it so simple for me to print out what I needed for our family. It also made it so simple just to click the links provided and be taken to the correct page immediately. 

I've included just a few of our favorites below.

Visiting the library and bringing home lots of books for our weekly topic.  All of the books were not necessary to bring home and often I substituted with a different book on the same topic.  I loved the fact that call numbers were included because that made it extremely easy to substitute a book when necessary.  Having different levels of books to read throughout the week helped us to look forward to Friday even more.

Starting our time off in God's Word.

Playing the Preamble Scramble

Taking the naturalization test and seeing how we scored.

Studying the voting process

Hands on activities bring learning to life for our family and help the pages of a history book feel more real. I've found that often as my children have grown older, each child would be in a different room doing their own studies. While I certainly want them to gain some independence in their studies, I still find that learning together provides us with a great balance. We the People: Getting to Know Your Constitution is a great way to bring families back to learning together. There is even part of the curriculum that includes Dad called, Stump Your Dad Trivia, and the suggested field trip ideas can be saved for a time when Dad is off too. We are planning a summer field trip by train to Washington, D.C. and now we are even more excited to tour our Nation's Capitol. Since we are all learning together, it makes it so much easier to discuss topics together as well.

Homeschool Legacy has many unit studies you can choose from including Weather On The Move, Horsing Around, Native America, and many more.

You can find out more about these unit studies by visiting there website, Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter. Click the banner below to find out what my fellow crew mates thought.