Good Civics and U.S. History Curriculum: Recommendations From an Upper Elementary Teacher
The goldfish cracker crumbs on my conference table stick to the edge of my water bottle, and I lean forward as Mrs. Henderson pulls out a dog-eared homeschool planner, flipping to a page marked with a neon pink sticker. “My 10-year-old says history is just dead people and dates he has to memorize for a test,” she says. “He came home after your class field trip last week talking about the Memphis sanitation strike, and I’ve never seen him excited about history before. What do you use? What’s actually good?”
I get that question all the time: from parents supplementing what their kid learns in public school, from homeschoolers tired of the same old options, from new teachers stuck with 20-year-old textbooks their district can’t afford to replace. Five years ago, I was right there with them, still using the district’s old textbook myself. It had one paragraph on the civil rights movement, one sentence on Native American removal after the 1830s, and the entire section on westward expansion started with “Pioneers built a new life on the empty plains.” Then one day, Marcus, a Black student in my 4th grade class, raised his hand after we finished the civil rights unit and said, “So after MLK gave his speech, everything was fixed? That’s it?” I stuttered through an answer, and after class I sat at my desk and realized the curriculum I was using wasn’t just boring—it was incomplete. That’s when I started testing every free and low-cost option I could get my hands on.
Any curriculum that treats history like a finished story, where all the big questions are already answered, isn’t worth your time. Good curriculum leaves space for kids to ask questions, and includes more voices than the same handful of men that show up on every dollar bill. Over the years, a few options have stuck with me as consistently solid, for every budget and setting.
For elementary kids, whether you’re teaching a class of 25 or homeschooling one, Beautiful Feet Books’ Early U.S. History curriculum is worth the investment if you can swing it. Instead of a textbook full of bullet points, it centers on real children’s literature written from different perspectives. Last year, when I did their westward expansion unit, I swapped my textbook chapter for The Birchbark House, written by Louise Erdrich, which follows an Ojibwe girl growing up on the Great Lakes in the 1800s. We also read Journey of the Sparrows, about a teen migrant from Guatemala crossing the border in the 1980s. By the end of the unit, the kids weren’t asking me what date the Oregon Trail started—they were asking why their old books said the plains were empty, when there were people already living there. If you can’t afford the full curriculum package, the Zinn Education Project has free elementary lesson plans that follow the same idea, aligned to most state standards. You just download them, print, and pair with books from your local library. No fancy materials needed.
For middle school, I always point people to Facing History and Ourselves. I taught 8th grade for three years before moving down to 4th, and we used their immigration unit. It doesn’t frame immigration as a feel-good story with no conflict. It walks kids through the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1910s Jewish tenant strikes in New York, and the discrimination Puerto Rican migrants faced in the 1950s, using primary sources—actual letters, newspaper clips, union flyers that real people wrote. Kids got to read a 12-year-old’s letter to her mom back in Puerto Rico asking why the landlord wouldn’t rent her family an apartment because of where they were from. That sticks with them way more than a bullet point that says “Immigration increased in the early 1900s.” It’s all free for teachers and parents to access, too.
For civics specifically, no matter what age, iCivics is my go-to free resource. A lot of civics curriculums only talk about the three branches of government and the president, and never mention what your local city council or school board does. iCivics has short games and 20-minute lessons that let kids do mock local elections, plan a mock community park project, and figure out how to bring a change they want to their own town. My neighbor homeschools her 12-year-old, and she started using this after her kid got upset about the playground at their local park being closed for six months of uncompleted repairs. They walked through how to write a letter to the city council together, using an iCivics lesson plan. That’s civics people actually participate in, not just memorizing the preamble to the Constitution.
Inevitably, someone asks if these curriculums are biased against the U.S. I tell them what I tell everyone: the old curriculums were biased. They only told the story from the perspective of the people who wrote the textbooks, not the people who were displaced, enslaved, or excluded from power. Adding more voices doesn’t mean removing the founding fathers or the major events you expect to see. It means adding the full story. When we talk about Thomas Jefferson, we still talk about the Declaration of Independence. We also talk about the 600+ enslaved people he owned, and how that shaped his views. That’s not being biased. That’s telling the truth.
Mrs. Henderson writes all these names down in her planner, checks her watch because her older kid has soccer practice in 20 minutes. Her son is in the hallway, spinning a neon fidget spinner he pulled from my class’s fidget bin, and he yells that he wants to read that Birchbark House book. I tell him I can lend him my classroom copy. She asks if I have any other quick tips, and I tell her you don’t have to do it all. You don’t need a $500 curriculum box to teach good history. Just pick one unit that adds a new voice, and go from there.
I walk them out to the parking lot, and the October sun is low through the oak trees by the school entrance. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, and I still find new lessons to try every semester. Last month I downloaded a new lesson on the 1968 Native American occupation of Alcatraz from Zinn that I’m going to test out next spring. I don’t have it all figured out, and I don’t think any curriculum is perfect. But the ones I’ve mentioned here do one thing really well: they make kids feel like history is their story, too, not just a list of facts to memorize. That’s more than I ever got when I was in school, and that’s enough for me.
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