If you and your children love to read cultural books and history books to learn about other people and time periods, you will want to check out the latest books we were sent to use during our homeschool. This post has been Brought to you by Carole P. Roman and Awaywegomedia.com.
Each book gives you a glimpse of the regular day to day routines, dress, diet, and more of a young person experiencing the every day life adventures during the time period of the book’s focus.
There were several books made available to us for review. (The following are my affiliate links to the books on Amazon.)
We were able to try:
I began with the book about Renaissance Italy, because my oldest 2 kids are learning about this time period in their regular history studies. My daughter was especially interested in the book, and stuck around while I read it all in one sitting!
As the book continues, it talks about artists and inventors, astronomers and architects. There are little bios at the end of the book of important people from the Italian Renaissance. Immediately following that is a glossary of words and names mentioned throughout the book, including help with pronunciation.
Let me warn you, these books are long. Several pages are full text with the mirroring page being the illustration or an illustration with text. The Renaissance book was 54 pages long if that gives you any indication of the amount of information it contains. The book on the Middle Ages is even longer at almost 100 pages!
The Italian Renaissance book sparked some great conversations with my daughter and oldest son. Like I mentioned, they’ve been learning about this incredible piece of history, so it was a good supplement. They were able to sort of take a look back in time from another perspective.
This book provided some great background story. We stopped several times through my reading for him to ask me what things meant, like rituals, reformers, and persecution. I love that the story uses big words so that it can be used with younger or older children. All of the words he asked about could be found in the glossary in the back of the book. This one had 62 pages, so it was pretty long, too!
The back of the book also contained bios of some of the more famous people from colonial America and cute little illustrations of them, too. This is a great resource, and I’ll be coming back to it when we do our study on Thanksgiving. My son really enjoyed hearing about it and asking questions.
Each of those books have different illustrators. The other 2 books we received were both illustrated by Mateya Arkova, so the illustrations are similar in both of those books.
The Middle Ages book takes readers back to the year 1072 where “your” family in a large house that was actually a castle because your father was a well to do landowner. The book goes on to talk about the dress, dining habits, classes of people, the life of a peasant, celebration, the architecture of homes and buildings, and travel during the time period. This book also concludes with a listing of famous people from the Middle Ages and a glossary of terms and names.
The Ancient Greece book takes you back to about 350 B.C. during the Classical Period. It tells about the political and military climate of the time, housing, food, education, clothing, hair styles, transportation, and even about the Olympics. There’s a listing of gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece at the end, too. As with the other books, there’s also a comprehensive glossary to help young learners understand the terminology.
My family and I tried the 4 books above, but other families were sent other books from the same 8 volume series. Be sure to check out their thoughts by clicking on the banner below: