Where do the resources come from?
Fourscore’s content comes from many different places. Thousands of articles included here were written by hundreds of professional and award-winning historians and were originally published in American Heritage magazine.
The documents, paintings, photographs, cartoons and artifacts have been drawn from a vast array of archives, libraries and museums across the country. For more information, please visit [link to overview on sources]
What is a Collection?
The Instructional Collections on Fourscore are curated resources that combine an article from American Heritage magazine with several related documents, both primary and secondary in nature. They also include recommended instructional tasks, which are aligned with the Common Core State Standards and the C3 Framework; suggested guiding questions; literary connections; and teacher-to-teacher tips for using the resources.
These Collections were created by master teachers from across the country, who selected materials that they would use in their own classrooms, and were edited and vetted by our team of educational professionals. Our designers then gave each Collection a beautiful and engaging design, making Fourscore Collections a truly unique resource for ELA and social studies teachers. For more information about the teachers who created the Collections, please visit our Teacher Review Panel page. [link]
Does Fourscore provide written lesson plans?
While Fourscore strives to provide teachers with trusted and engaging material, we do not provide specific lesson plans. Fundamentally, we believe that teachers should make informed decisions about their own students when selecting and creating lesson plans. Therefore, Fourscore has mapped out twenty-five suggested instructional tasks, which are aligned with the Common Core State Standards and the C3 Framework, and has given teachers models of how to use and implement those tasks, rather than providing rigid lesson plans. Teachers can also download Word versions of each task and edit the text in order to personalize the activity for their own students.
For what ages/grades is Fourscore designed? Are there resources for elementary teachers?
About 80% of the articles on Fourscore are geared toward students in grades 9-12, based on the text complexity scores from ETS. The remaining articles fall into the middle school and college levels. While the instructional resources are most suitable for high school students, we understand that many 8th grade teachers cover American History in their courses, and thus we want to give middle school educators access to our rich content. At this time, Fourscore does not provide material for elementary students, though we hope to expand to that age group in a later phase of development.
What types of content do you have on the site?
Fourscore is unique in the way that it brings together content and material from a number of different sources. We also have a wide range of types of content, including articles, letters, speeches, paintings, photographs, political cartoons, maps, songs, videos and other primary and secondary documents, providing alternative points of view to further analysis of events. For more information on the content on our site, please visit [link to overview of sources.]