Literature-based American History through 1812: Grammar Stage (introduction to a multipart post)

I finished! 

My plan for American History in elementary school is to break it into three chunks:  3rd grade prehistory-1812, 5th grade 1812-1912, 6th grade 1912-present.  (Fourth grade is for state history, in our case Minnesota).    I wanted to do a literature-based study, so I got looooong lists of supposedly wonderful living children's books.  And then I ordered just about everything that seemed good out of the library and vetted them to find out which ones seemed (a) age appropriate for my 8-year-old (b) good read alouds (c) either the ethnic language was not offensive or I would be able to redact on the fly by word-substitution while reading aloud. 

This took me maybe three months of working in my spare time, to get up to 1812 or so.

Anyway, I'll post the planned curriculum here in a series of posts.  Here's what's up so far:

• Part 1.   First immigrants and native peoples.
• Part 2.  Europeans get interested in the Americas.
• Part 3.  The Spanish, French, Dutch, and English settlers.
• Part 4. Colonial expansion and the Western frontier.
• Part 5.  Life in Colonial America. 
• Part 6.  The French and Indian War. 

More will appear here as I add sections.