Constitution and the Bill of Rights

Kevin Mark Smith, an allied attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom in Wichita, Kansas, teaches the Constitution and Bill of Rights course on SchoolhouseTeachers.com to help your student understand what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This course includes prompts for independent study, term paper assignments, and exams, covering topics such as executive orders and regulations, taxes, and where our rights come from. Included is a Teacher’s Handbook that provides exams, answer keys, and teacher helps. The lessons are best studied sequentially as they move through the Constitution and Bill of Rights in order, therefore building upon the history of these documents. This course counts as a social studies credit.  Students who complete the 16 weekly lessons may earn 0.5 academic credit. As always, please check your own state’s academic requirements.

Thank you for your commitment to the Constitution and the freedoms that every American should cherish. I began writing the Patriot’s Guide to the Bill of Rights in serial form for The Old Schoolhouse^® Magazine’s We The People Column in 2013 after watching a few late night man on the street interviews where reporters asked clean cut, regular Americans common sense questions about the United States government, its leaders, the Constitution, and Declaration of Independence. Most of those questioned got the answers wrong. Few could tell in what century the American Revolution occurred.

When the interviewer got into more fundamental questions such as whether the government should be able to take someone’s land away if an endangered species was threatened, most said sure. It didn’t matter that the Constitution would have to be suspended to deny the landowner his unalienable right to property.

The fact that you are including this course in your curriculum indicates that you want your child to know the correct answers when asked questions about what our Founding Fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s also possible that you will learn some things about the Constitution and its founding principles that you didn’t learn in school.

I’m a lawyer, but I, too, learned a lot while researching this project. We’re never too old or too smart to learn.

This course is broken down into 16 units. It relies on your student doing independent research throughout the course. Unit 1 gives a brief lesson on using Google and Google Scholar to research legal cases and topics, as well as other organizational and note-taking apps to save the results of your student’s research. Each unit has a section called Independent Exploration at the end that often requires using Google or Google Scholar to look up cases and information to build a research file for your student’s mid-term and term papers.

I’ve included a Teacher’s Handbook that has exams, answer keys, and teacher helps. It also has some suggestions on grading the student’s work in the course. If you have questions about the course, don’t hesitate to send me email at kmsmith@acelaw.net. I will be more than happy to help you prepare your student for a terrific experience learning about the Bill of Rights and her unalienable rights.