Many homeschoolers prefer to use older history resources such as the popular The Landmark History of the American People (LHAP). The original book has been published as either one or two volumes a number of times since 1968. I have reviewed Avyx’s 2013 edition of the book that is printed in two volumes.
LHAP is great, whatever version you use, but there are no teacher's guides or support materials written specifically for it. Sonlight has published comprehensive courses that incorporate LHAP and provide lesson plans and other support material for the textbooks. However, some families will want to use LHAP without the comprehensive Sonlight course. This is where Aim for Wisdom’s workbook comes in.
Aim for Wisdom’s U.S. History Workbook of Questions and Answers was designed for the Avyx edition of LHAP, but it can be used with any version. It provides comprehension questions for every chapter and an answer key at the back of the book. Note that it includes questions for a final chapter that addresses a few events in the early 1980s that has been omitted from the Avyx version of the textbook. (This is not a critical chapter.)
Aim for Wisdom also has a separate, overarching book with lesson plans for LHAP, titled U.S. History Assignment Checklist. It is based on the use of LHAP and the workbook plus other resources. Those other resources include the United States Coloring Book by Winky Adam, index cards which will be made into flashcards for states and capitals, a binder to be used for creating a timeline, and supplemental historical novels and biographies.
The U.S. History Assignment Checklist briefly lists activities that include the reading assignment in the textbook (usually two or three chapters at a time), workbook questions to answer, a list of events for students to add to their timelines (with images they find or create), the use of flashcards and coloring pages for individual states, and reading from the suggested literature selections.
The Checklist also adds two extra lessons that are not in the textbook. The first is a preparatory lesson that covers Christopher Columbus and other explorers and is based on the book Columbus by Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire. This lesson has two pages of questions plus six pages of map work. The second extra lesson consists only of mapwork that relates to the 1800s cattle trails and the construction of the Kansas Pacific and Union Pacific railroads.
A Catholic version of the Checklist adds literature selections and timeline entries for people and topics important to Catholics and doesn’t remove any of the content already there.
The Checklist is not essential, but it adds more dimensions to the study of U.S. history. Keep in mind that you can use its activities selectively. For instance, if your student already knows the states and capitals, you might skip the coloring book and the states and capitals flashcards. Of course, you can also choose how many of the works of literature to read.
Inexpensive resources like this make it easy to use older versions of textbooks that have withstood the test of time.
