The Homefront

See what your students get, and why it lands.

No mockups. Every page below is real, pulled straight from the files you download. Tap any one to see it full size.

A worksheet was never going to teach this.

Your students are not answering questions about 1942. They are sitting in the chair of the Civilian Defense Coordinator in Harborview, California, reading the directive that just landed on the desk. The Daily Briefing hands them a real federal order, sugar rationing one day, an ancestry-based curfew the next, property liquidation after that, and asks for a call: comply, refuse, or partial. The Nakamura, Tanaka, and Yamamoto families are named, not abstract. Kenji Nakamura's 320-acre farm is on the line. George Yamamoto serves in the U.S. Army while his mother faces a curfew based on ancestry. Students weigh the evidence in front of them, then commit the decision to their journal. The order is reasonable today, which is the whole point.

Tap to read a Daily Briefing

They are graded on their reasoning, not on what they chose.

The Hybrid-100 rubric runs on a mirror, not an answer key. A student who complies with every order can still earn full marks by writing a rigorous, honest audit of why. A student who resists and skips the self-examination cannot. Sixty points reward daily journal engagement: naming the evidence, naming the families, getting specific. Twenty points go to holistic quality, bias awareness, and the depth of self-honesty. The final twenty cover pattern analysis, the historical connection, and modern transfer. Assessment is decoupled from the decision on purpose, so students can look squarely at their own compliance pattern without fearing an academic penalty for it. The grade rewards the intellectual courage to study your own reflection.

Tap to read the grading rubric

Let the workbook hold the busywork.

The student Workbook is a self-tallying spreadsheet, the Compliance Tracker, that records every Comply, Refuse, or Partial across all fifteen days. Students do not hand-count anything. The tracker quietly assembles their choices into a visible pattern, the Compliance Ladder, so that by the reckoning they are reading their own behavior back to themselves rather than reconstructing it from memory. That frees their energy for the part that matters: the judgment behind each call and the honest journal entry that explains it. When a student is absent, the workbook keeps the simulation's logic intact. They read the missed briefing, journal, and catch up without breaking the sequence. The mechanical work is automated so the thinking is not.

Tap to see the tracker

Every day is already scripted.

The Teacher Guide carries the narrative weight so you can carry the room. Each of the fifteen days arrives with a scripted briefing, the facilitation moves, and the design notes you need to run it cold. The no-prep philosophy is real: self-tallying workbooks, turnkey student files, and a built-in absence fallback mean you are not assembling materials the night before. The guide also includes a mandatory sensitivity protocol, with private outreach to Japanese American students, so the unit stays safe and professional given the history it confronts. You bring the facilitation and your read of the class. The simulation brings the structure, the evidence, the families, and the scaffolding for a debrief students will remember.

Tap to read the teacher guide

The lesson plan is already written.

Every simulation comes with a fully editable, admin-ready lesson plan. Standards alignment, daily pacing, learning objectives, differentiation, and an assessment plan are already done, so you can hand it to an administrator or adapt it to your district template in minutes.

Tap to preview the lesson plan

The day the signature stopped being enough.

On Day 3, a rumor reaches the desk. A neighbor has been accused, and there is no evidence behind it, only the identity of the person named and a war that wants a simple target. The Coordinator has spent two days saying yes to reasonable things, sugar rationing on Day 1, a bond drive on Day 2, and each yes felt like ordinary civic duty. So this one arrives wearing the same uniform. The federal directive is signed. The crowd in the room wants a side picked. For a moment the easy move is obvious: the order is signed, so the order is justified, and turning back now would look like having been wrong before.

Then the student looks at what they actually have. A confident source. A signature. No facts. They notice the curfew on Day 6 is built on ancestry, that the Day 7 liquidation only makes sense if the earlier compliance is treated as proof. At the pivot the choice is bare: protect the pattern of yeses, or trust the evidence in front of them. The student who chooses the evidence sees the ladder for the first time. No single rung looked like the unthinkable step, and that is precisely how they climbed it.

Harborview, California, spring 1942.

Students become the Civilian Defense Coordinator of Harborview, a town with real neighbors. Over fifteen days a sequence of federal directives escalates from sugar rationing and workforce mobilization to ancestry-based curfews, property liquidation, and the removal of forty-seven neighbors under Executive Order 9066. Every order demands a call: comply, refuse, or partial. The Nakamura, Tanaka, and Yamamoto families make the stakes concrete, from Kenji Nakamura's 320-acre farm to George Yamamoto serving in the Army while his mother is curfewed by ancestry.

Engineering better thinkers.

Compliance does not arrive as one dramatic choice. It accumulates through small administrative yeses, each defensible on its own. The Homefront uses a discovery-first design so students live a bias before it is named, then pairs each one with the capacity built to defeat it.

15 days down the Compliance Ladder.

Day 0 sets the table: students research the biases and meet the Harborview families as people, not categories. From there the directives escalate one defensible step at a time, building to a moral peak on Day 10 and a long-arc reckoning that connects 1942 to the present.

Standards alignment.

The Homefront is built for US History and grounded in the C3 Framework for Social Studies inquiry and NCSS standards. Students evaluate primary directives and credibility (D3.1.9-12, D3.2.9-12), weigh causation and contingency in the run-up to Executive Order 9066 (D2.His.14.9-12, D2.His.16.9-12), and analyze the perspectives of the Nakamura, Tanaka, and Yamamoto families against the historical record (D2.His.4.9-12, D2.His.6.9-12). The Cascade and final reflection carry students into civic application and reasoned argument (D4.1.9-12, D4.6.9-12). For APUSH classrooms it supports Period 7 content and the historical reasoning skills of contextualization, causation, and use of evidence.

Turnkey, classroom-ready.