THE CURRICULUM

Because knowing our culture is a lifelong journey, CCV has lessons for children of all ages.

Little Legacies (Ages 3-6) is Creative Curriculum Ventures' entry point for your youngest homeschooler, so even a 3-year-old can join the mily's shared study of Black art and culture. It supports an early-literacy foundation, built entirely from the artists, stories, and art forms your child is already falling in love with. Each lesson follows a simple, steady rhythm: Look at one image or moment from an artist's life, Talk through a few open-ended questions with no wrong answers, and Make something with their hands that connects back to what the artist did. No reading required, no long sit-down lessons — just one artist, one sitting, one memory made together.

Culture Carriers (Ages 7–12)

Culture Carriers is CCV’s tier for tweens who are ready to move from feeling to thinking — old enough to sit with a photograph or a piece of music and start asking why it was made, and what it was trying to say. The name reflects what's actually happening developmentally at this age: your child stops being just a witness to the culture they're learning about and starts becoming someone who carries it forward.

Culture Carriers lessons follow four steps: Explore a photograph, film clip, or artwork with no context yet — what do you notice first? Investigate through a short timeline and a few guided questions about the artist's life and a moment in history. Connect the artist's choices to a bigger historical or social idea through a journal prompt. Create using the same tools or techniques the artist worked in.

Each Culture Carriers lesson includes: one artist or artwork, a short timeline of their life and era, guided investigation questions, a personal journal prompt connecting their work to a larger idea, a hands-on creative project using their techniques, and a note grounding the lesson for the fuller context your child will meet in New Griots.

New Griots (Ages 13+) are multi-lesson units with a singular focus — the full expression of what CCV set out to build: an arts-infused, secular, project-based course of study centered on Black art, history, and culture, built for the whole family to learn together. The name draws on the griot tradition — the West African storyteller and historian entrusted with carrying a community's history forward through voice and craft — and it names what this age group is finally ready to do: not just receive the culture, but interpret, question, and retell it.

Where Culture Carriers investigates one artist or artwork at a time, New Griots goes deeper. Courses are organized into modules — the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and beyond — built around primary sources: films, photography, plays, museum exhibits, and first-hand accounts. Students engage in real historical and artistic analysis, not just appreciation, developing the critical-thinking skills to place a single artist's work inside the larger arc of a movement, an era, and a legacy still unfolding.

Each New Griots module includes: a sequence of lessons organized around a historical period or movement, or significant artistic achievement, primary-source materials for direct engagement, discussion and analysis built to Common Core and Core Arts standards, and a project-based capstone that asks students to create, critique, or curate — the same work a griot has always done.

Together, the three tiers form one continuous line: Little Legacies (3-6) builds the earliest emotional and literacy foundation, Culture Carriers (7–12) teaches a child to investigate and connect, and New Griots (13+) hands them the full weight — and the full craft — of carrying the story forward themselves.

Each month, CCV posts new modules and lessons. Both include lists of additional resources, quizzes, assignments, and projects.