This post has been a long time coming, as we have been using Beautiful Feet’s Early American History for over a year now. You can get through it in a year’s time, but we all enjoy it so much, we opted to stretch it out, allowing ourselves to dive deeper into the events we find fascinating, and venturing down the rabbit holes of additional books and videos.
If you are new to Beautiful Feet, let me introduce you to why it’s our favorite part of our curriculum.
Beautiful Feet offers literary-based curriculum for kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. They believe strongly that we are born with an innate desire to learn through the power of story and offer Charlotte Mason inspired history and literature curriculum.
Since we have used Beautiful Feet Around the World curriculum (see that detailed review here), Around the World Part 2 curriculum, and Early American History curriculum, I can vouch for the “sticking” power of this method.
My girls remember the Yangtze River in China thanks to the story Ping. They love to tell people that contrary to popular belief, the Vikings (see detail on the Viking unit here) were actually the first Europeans to land in America, and so on and so forth.
It’s been great to watch history come to life before us through living books and we’ve had great discussions thanks to the multiple viewpoints the curriculum presents the material through.
See all our homeschool curriculum picks and posts here.
Five Reasons We Love Beautiful Feet Early American History
- The teacher’s guide is simply and beautifully designed. There is no confusion on how to run each lesson. It provides clear directions, discussion questions, and extras if you so choose, like related youtube videos, books, songs, and more.
- The lessons are what I call “bite-sized,” usually taking no more than 20 minutes if sticking the basic lesson. Primary (K-3) level is designed to do 2-3 lessons a week.
- The books used are engaging and offer differing perspectives on historic events (such as the Native American’s view on the European settlers). Even the chapter books with no pictures (that I was somewhat worried about for my 7 year old) ended up being huge hits, as each lesson broke the book into digestible units.
- The Historic Table at the end of each unit highlights cuisine and includes recipes that would have been common to the people and time frame we are studying. For us food lovers, this makes a really fun way to dive deeper into a unit and really connect to the time period. We use this as a “celebration” before we move onto the next unit and it’s always so much fun.
- Purchasing the Primary Pack comes with everything you need. Every book, every print out, the journal, the teacher’s guide- everything. I love that I’m never searching for supplies or not ready for a lesson. Plus the books are so good that they’ve become favorites on our book shelves to go back to, even long after the unit has ended.
