The “Own It!”Handbook for Ages 11-16 is the guide book for a transformative after-school, trauma-informed enrichment program. It provides a series of lessons & activities that nurture academic skills, personal growth and leadership. It uses history to connect our past to our future, as part of the Own Your History® (OYH) Collection.Our inheritances from family history and from living in the United States provide the starting point for our personal journeys.  Our individual stories are part of a complex American history. We each can choose consciously to write our life story and work for a greater future.  But Own It! is not “school” and it differs from traditional approaches to history. Own It! helps students learn more about themselves, as well as their community and the country. Own It! enhances students’ engagement in being creative, making things happen, and  achieving goals. Its mission is to help them step up and enrich their lives, especially by understanding that they live in history.

People make the past come alive as students research and then share stories about famous Americans who promoted democratic ideals.

Students tell their life stories in this lesson about autobiographies based on family photographs.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Korrell Pierson for US History; Adaptable to other grades. The assignment asks students to research three generations of the immigration experience (or migration) within their family, or members of your community and to gain a better understanding of the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience and whether or not their experiences mirrored those learned about in Industrialization, Progressivism and Immigration units or if they differed.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Rachel Wylie for Global History. Adaptable to other grades. History is the study of the past based on available evidence at the time. In this project, you will create a time capsule full of evidence to allow your descendants to better understand who you are, your immigration story, and what life was like in 2018. This opportunity allows you to use evidence to enable future generations of your family to reconstruct your personal past. Each student’s time capsule will undergo peer-analysis of the primary evidence provided in the capsule.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Deirdre H. Tuite for US History; Adaptable to other grades. Throughout this year we study how the United States came to fruition. We evaluate the reasons behind the establishment of the United States and the key figures in our history. However, it is important to remember that students too are part of America’s history. The student's history is our nation’s history. As we progress through the year, these assignments have students documenting their own history, through various projects: an interview, a community snapshot, and family artifact, ending with a personal essay.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Melissa Banks for her Global History; with modifications for English Language Learners. The assignment asks students to investigate their own immigration story, and to create a storybook that connect the to push-pull factors in their own immigration story to world history events.

Created by NHPRC Teacher Participant/Creator Jennifer Stalec for AP World History Adaptable to other grades, and timelines. Four-part project (conducted over 4 weeks at the end of the year) that asks students to conduct individual oral history and secondary source research, reflect on research, creatively express and engagingly present family-history and world-history source materials.   .