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I live in NY State and our regulations state that we must teach U.S. History in grades 1-6. My 3rd grader is in Bigger right now, so next year he will be in Preparing. I was wondering if there is any United States History in Preparing or CTC. Even a little will fulfill my obligation since there is nothing stated about how many hours need to be taught. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Tracey

In Preparing there is intertwined into some of the WWI and WWII stuff as well as one of the read aloud books is Pedro's Journal which is about Columbus and what he actually did discover. I'm pretty sure there are other mentions as well, just not anything really in depth. CTC is a little tougher, but if you pick some of the books from the boys pack for story time then you could cover it through those ie Diary of an Early American Boy, Mr. Revere and I.

We are in CTC right now and the history pack books add so much to the guide I was going to suggest you pick American history stories for your DITHOR or reading books if you don't need a full class. Like Lynn said, Preparing does have some at the end.

Countrymom - that would be a tough choice I agree - the history books verses the girl or boy book packs as the story time books. I will say that I have read a few of the girl and the boy books that were listed in CTC and they were excellent too. I did choose the history pack to go with the guide this year for my dd and my reading of those other books was for pure enjoyment (I read them at night before my kids went to bed). If you have to pick and you aren't able to use DITHOR to meet the history needs, I would definitely pick either the girl book pack or the boy book pack over the history book pack for story time. This will definitely fulfill your American History requirement in NY. And the books are excellent.

Since there is no amount specified, have them listen to a story on CD about any American history and call it good. There are so many out there. The Rush Revere books on CD are really good. They are super corny but packed with great info and my kids loved them. I wouldn't worry about whether it's in the "curriculum" or not.

Both Preparing and CtC are great guides. You will love them.

show them Liberty's Kids videos? Talk about things that happened today in history every once in a while. Talk about what each holiday means and why we have it? These are all ways you can cover US history when it's not actually in the curriculum.

If you want to have something to show them, how about using books tied to US History for a genre or three of DITHOR? Biography, realistic fiction, and historical fiction would all be easy to do that way. Non fiction would also work. I just looked at the DITHOR 4/5 Boy pack, and a few of those would work:
Buffalo Bill (folk tale)
Sign of the Beaver (historical fiction)
Jed Smith (biography)

The girl pack also has similar options:
Pocahontas and Fanny Crosby (biography)
Freedom Crossing (historical fiction)
Naya Nuki (non fiction)

Then for the book projects, maybe do something to "drive home" the US History in the books?

I live in NY state, so I thought I'd pop in and add to the discussion.

The regulations are worded poorly, but the bottom line is you don't need to cover United States history each year. If you look a bit further down the regulations, it states:

(iii) The following courses shall be taught at least once during the first eight grades: United States history, New York State history, and the Constitutions of the United States and New York State.

On my IHIP, I have two columns, one that lists all of the required subjects and one that lists what I'm using for each. When I did Preparing, my two columns for history simply looked like:

History........................Preparing Hearts for His Glory: An Learning Program for Ages 8-10, Heart of Dakota Publishers (Dell Rapids, SD)

My IHIP has always been approved without any question.

HTH!