I've been teaching children and youth about the U.S. founding and the Constitution of the United States for over a decade. Before I ever began teaching others I spent a decade teaching myself. Beginning in my twenties when I set a goal to read all the federalist papers and the anti-federalist papers. I continued with the Hillsdale college Constitution Reader which contained the most important source documents that influenced the formation of our Constitution and expressed the founding principles upon which our founders would build a new nation.
When I began homeschooling, and organized my first homeschool cooperative, I organized my studies into a Constitution course for high-school. The course was two part, first, we studied the six foundational principals of free republics and read from those documents most influential on the construction of the Constitution and those writings that best express the foundations of our political ideals. Once we understood the foundations, part two was a study of the legal framework laid out in the U.S. Constitution. We were then able to discuss how the foundational principles uphold the Constitution's legal framework and how the legal framework is designed to protect and preserve the principles of liberty in action. As we studied the amendments to the constitution and the court rulings that interpreted it, the students were better able to judge whether the amendment strengthened or weakened the foundation and whether the court precedent was foundationally sound or not.
After teaching the Constitution this way to teens, parents in my co-op desired a similar course for younger students. I created an elementary reader outline for the Six Foundational Principles of Free Republics and then a Constitution lap book to help me teach upper-elementary students about the constitution. You can click on these links to find these teaching tools.
Six Foundational Principles of Free Republics: Elementary Reader
*The lap book in in pieces in this google folder. The various documents are printed out, and cut in order to cut and past them into a lap book. There are many ways you could arrange them, and many ways to fold the file folders to make a lap book with sections. The way that I did it was to fold each side of the the file folder into the center to create a narrow and tall pamphlet size folder. I used colored file folders, one color for the sections for article one, and a different color for each section. I cut and pasted the constitution into the folded columns of the narrow sections and the explanatory prints on the other flaps around the original text. There are many ways to lay the info in, as it is with most lap books. So it's a creative process. The printouts give you great topics to discuss in each article and easy to understand summaries.
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