My Picks for History
Our family studies history chronologically, working from the Ancients to the Modern Era over a 5 year cycle. I actually waited until my oldest was in second grade to start, because people had told me to spend the early grades doing local social studies. Frankly, he wasn’t too interested, and since we all do history together as a family, his younger sisters all skipped the municipal helpers stuff when they got to school age and dove right into the world history along with him as soon as they were old enough to pay attention to the read alouds.
I emphatically believe that textbooks are NOT the best way to study history. Instead, we use a well-written history storybook for our “spine” and then add in tons of read alouds, biographies, visual reference books, and a personal timeline notebook for each kid in which they paste timeline figures of all the major people and events we study. There are a few good options for a history spine, but I always recommend Story of the World first because it’s well-written and because each volume has an activity guide full of fun activities (ask my kids about mummifying a chicken!), maps, and reading suggestions. We have several illustrated reference guides (the Usborne history dates book pictured above, an illustrated history encyclopedia, and a few others I’ve picked up at library used book sales), and then I go through recommended reading lists and check out a bin full of library books for every new topic we study. We don’t read them all together, but if I have a temptingly stuffed library basket, my kids will gravitate toward it and read the books in their free time.
Because Story of the World covers so much in each volume, I stretch our studies out over more years than the four allotted to the program, adding in a more focused year of American and state history (we lived in California when we hit American history in our first go-through, and we loved taking a semester to do the Beautiful Feet California History literature package along with tons of field trips!). Now that we’re on our second cycle through world history, I’m finding that we’re following different rabbit trails as the kids are older and have different interests. We spent all last spring on Ancient Egypt, but when my kids are excited about a topic and want to go more in depth, I don’t want to stop artificially and push on just to finish a textbook.
This fall, we’re leaning in hard to the Greeks, so we’ll be reading The Golden Fleece and The Tale of Troy and listening to D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and The Children’s Homer while having my teen read along to Ian McKellan’s recording of The Odyssey. We’ll be doing Athens and Sparta over the winter, and in the spring, when we hit the Romans, I’m looking forward to revisiting one of our all-time favorite family read-alouds, Detectives in Togas (followed by The Mystery of the Roman Ransom), as well as The Bronze Bow. I firmly believe that great children’s literature can teach history more effectively than dry textbooks; when I finally visited Rome in my late 20’s, I had the delightful protagonists of Detectives in Togas in my head (speaking in the voices of my dad reading to us as kids) as I wandered Capitoline Hill!
You don’t need to use the same books that we do, of course—and what books we use will depend on what our local library has available as we hit new time periods. (If there’s a David Macaulay movie about our time period, we always watch it, too! Any decent library will have them in their juvenile nonfiction movie collections.)
I always recommend that new homeschoolers start at the beginning with ancient history, regardless of what the kids studied in school the previous year, but if you're not up for that, Story of the World does have volumes for the Middle Ages, Early Modern Times, and The Modern Age, and the same principles of engaging reading and lots of hands-on activities apply.
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