A QUICK NOTE:

This unit is free because cost should never be the reason a kid does not get to look closely at their country's story.

If you are able, you can add five dollars at download. That money goes toward printing this curriculum and getting it onto the shelves of rural and lower-income libraries, the places where a free copy does the most good. You are not paying for your own copy. You are quietly buying one for a family who could not.

No pressure either way. The free version is complete and yours to keep.

Two Hundred Fifty Years.

This is not a parade and it is not a coloring page. It is a real art history unit, 168 pages of it, built around twenty-five works that together tell the actual story of America from 1768 to today.

One question runs the whole way down: who is in the picture, and who got left out? You will meet a silversmith, a runaway family on a single horse, a six-year-old walking into school past a screaming crowd, a president painted by an artist history kept leaving out. Your kids learn to read a painting the way you read a person, closely, fondly, without flinching. That habit, asking who made this, who paid for it, who is missing, and what it wants me to feel, works on old paintings and on everything that scrolls past them every day.

Every work comes with three ways in, so the same picture meets your nine-year-old and your sixteen-year-old right where each one stands. Look is for your youngest. Think is for the middle. Go Deeper is for high schoolers and for you. Each tier gives you something to talk about, something to do, and something to try on paper.

It is secular, museum-grounded, and honest about the hard parts as well as the beautiful ones, because the most loving thing you can do for a place is look at it clearly and stay.

Free, and yours to keep.

What's inside

• 168 pages, 25 works of art, walked in order from 1768 to today
• Three levels on every work: Look, Think, and Go Deeper
• 225 discussion questions and 150 activities and writing prompts
• An era page for each work, with the events and artworks around it
  
• A full glossary of terms worth keeping
• Delivered as a PDF you can read, print, and keep

Grade range
Upper elementary through high school. One unit, three built-in levels.