Recall and connect the causes, key events, and founding documents of the Revolution and early republic studied across the unit.
This week connects the whole founding-era unit. You have traced how war debt led to new taxes and colonial protest; watched Boston become the center of resistance; read the Declaration of Independence's bold ideas and its honest gaps; sequenced the war's turning points; met founders both famous and often-overlooked; watched a failed first government give way to the Constitution's stronger, but still imperfect, plan; and studied the Bill of Rights and the real debate over ratification.
The big idea underneath the whole unit: building a new nation was not one clean, uninterrupted success story, but a long chain of real problems, real arguments, and real compromises -- some inspiring, and some, like the Three-Fifths Compromise, genuinely troubling. Holding the full, honest picture together is exactly the historical-thinking skill this whole year has been building, and it will matter again as the story moves next into the new nation's rapid growth westward.
Mastery looks like: They can connect at least four major events from weeks 19-26 into one coherent account of the Revolution and the founding of the new government.
Common stumbles: Remembering isolated dates without connecting cause and effect; describing the founding era as free of real conflict or troubling compromise.