Three-Year Week-by-Week Social Studies Program

We offer a delightful take on the ancient world up to the modern era in Time Travel Tours: Your Guide to Human History and its companion volume, Mysteries That Changed History, a casebook that allows students to investigate critical crimes. Through these books and the suggested Guided Discussions and Activities, students will apply analytic and chronological thinking to understand how ideas migrate across cultures and the dynamic interactions that create opportunities for cultural growth and changes.

Our approach to American history starts with American Hero, a narrative adventure story that covers the development of the United States up through the Civil War. Because primary-source research is so important, we include First Person American, a comprehensive and unique anthology of non-fiction from a variety of points of view. Through the Guided Discussions and Activities in the curriculum, and based on the readings from these books, students will evaluate the socio-economic conflicts in the Western Hemisphere from the Native American reaction to the First Contact through the evolution of American federalism and its crisis-point over the issue of slavery in the 19th century.

There is a clear and present need for greater civics instruction in this country. Our civics course combines the international evolution of laws, governments, virtues, and rhetoric in Civil Discourse and How to Survive It with an in-depth look at the American foundational documents in The U.S. Constitution: An Owner’s Manual. With these books, as well as the Guided Discussions and Activities, students will compare and contrast the ethical development of world societies from “Plato to NATO,” and they will analyze and critique how civics has been demonstrated around the world and in the United States. Students will identify and distinguish the ideals set out in American foundational documents and the realities of history.