History

Here are some things we've used to learn about history. My plan was to take a "classical" approach and progress from ancient times to modern, but American history kept inserting itself, so we're sort of doing it all together.

Recently we've discovered the Liberty's Kids series from PBS, and we've watched a whole bunch so far. One of our libraries has the whole set, and we're watching them mostly in order, depending on what's available in a given week.

Big, giant U.S. presidents timeline from C-SPAN. Wunderkind likes big timelines and graphs and maps and things:

Total winner of a game: Presidents vs. Aliens! Answer questions about the presidents and then fling them at the space aliens. You can read more about the app here and here.

Here are some books and DVDs we've used over the years. The maps workbook (one of a few) isn't really about history, I guess; Wunderkind just likes maps. Not pictured are "Magic Tree House" books, which are fun for introducing new topics.

These two books ("friends of the library" sale finds: Bible Atlas and A Street through Time) are nice supplements to The Story of the World: Ancient Times, by Susan Wise Bauer, and the E. H. Gombrich book A Little History of the World. I especially like the Gombrich book because it's written from a European perspective, not North American, and the viewpoint is just different enough to make you think a little extra. References to bird migrations, for example, have the birds ending up in Africa and not the Gulf of Mexico or South America. WK's favorite parts of ancient history are about the various alphabets and systems of writing -- when they started and how they changed.

This is a FANTASTIC book I found in the remainders section of the bookstore: the Time Chart of World History ...

... featuring a giant foldout thing called a "Histomap" that takes up a whole floor. You can see it better here at this link. It shows the development of civilizations from 2000 BCE to now, and WK really does like to trace which groups come in where, and what happened to them. Just look how long the Chinese civilization has lasted (orange, way over at the right)!

And we have other miscellany around the house, like placemats of inventors and presidents and things to start conversations, and to tie into books and TV stories and DVDs: