Seven books that each teach one nameable piece of the American federal system to children between about six and twelve. Each meets a child at whatever level they're actually reading at, which is the point: a six-year-old can have the mice and a twelve-year-old can have the Constitutional Convention in the same room in the same week and both are on the same unit. Between them they cover the Electoral College, the Preamble in its own words, how a bill becomes a law, how the Supreme Court can undo it, what a President does all day, how the Constitution got written and ratified, and who was allowed to vote and when. Pick the piece you're teaching on Tuesday and take that book.
Every book here was picked because it names a piece of machinery and shows it running. Grace for President is the Electoral College, and it teaches it by accident of plot — Grace wants to win, so she has to find out how winning is measured, and the answer turns out to be states rather than people. That is the single most useful and hardest-to-teach idea on this shelf and it arrives without a word of explanation. David Catrow's Preamble book is a primary source with cartoons on it: the complete text of the Preamble, verbatim, over a slapstick camping trip, plus a glossary that translates it phrase by phrase. It explains nothing and it isn't trying to. A More Perfect Union is the Constitutional Convention as narrative history, the summer of 1787 and the ratification fight afterwards, which very nearly failed. What's the Big Deal About Elections is the fact book, and the only one that reaches past structure into who was allowed to vote and when. Then there are the mice, and they need saying plainly. House Mouse, Senate Mouse, Marshall, the Courthouse Mouse and Woodrow, the White House Mouse are a matched set by Peter and Cheryl Barnes — the publisher sells them as one, under the title A Mice Way to Learn About Government, with a curriculum guide that teaches all three together. Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency: one branch each, mice in period dress, rhyming couplets, in accurately drawn real buildings. So take all three on purpose, because they fit a branches-of-government unit exactly and the Court book is a genuine sequel to the Congress one, or take the one branch you need. What you should not do is read them as three separate recommendations, because they are one thing. What they're like: the verse is functional rather than good, the couplets are there to carry the civics and get bent around words like 'unconstitutional', and a child who doesn't like being taught in rhyme will not be won over by these rhymes. The appeal is entirely the government content and the buildings. Cheryl Barnes trained as an architect and it shows on every page. One more fact, stated and not argued: the series is published by Regnery, under its Little Patriot Press imprint, and Regnery is a press with an explicit political identity. The books themselves are procedural — they explain how a bill becomes a law, not what the law should be — and there is no living politician, party or policy in any of them. A teacher choosing classroom material may want to know the imprint anyway. Last thing, and it matters when you're choosing what a class sees: Grace for President is the only book here with a child in it. She is a girl and she is Black, on a shelf that is otherwise mice and documents and rooms full of men in coats.