"Reaching Our Connecticut Kids" Homeschool Support     Learning History Tips from Local Homeschoolers   From Teresa Gallagher:   I was really inspired by the popular manual of classical homeschooling called "The Well Trained Mind," which recommends that history be taught as a world-wide story beginning at the beginning (prehistory) and proceeding in chronological order up to the present.  The authors of the Well Trained Mind recommend taking four years to cover all of history, starting in the first grade.   For the first four years, kids learn about history in a story-book fashion.   Then, in the fifth year, they go back and relearn history for the next four years, but in a more sophisticated manner.  We didn't get started until the third or fourth grade and are going at our own pace, but are still following the general idea. We've very successfully used the following to learn world history together (I sure never learned it in school).  1. "The Story of the World" books:  This is a four-volume series of wonderful history books for the grade-school-level child written by Susan Wise Bauer, one of the authors of "The Well Trained Mind."  These books are a great introduction and are written not as textbooks, but as storybooks.  My only complaint is that the tone and content do not alway seem to be on the same level, meaning that a child old enough to understand the complexity in the book may be annoyed by the patronizing tone of the writer, who wrote the first book for a six-year-old audience. 2. Time lines:  We made one over-all timeline that covers the last 10,000 years.  In addition, we have made timelines for Ancient history, Medieval history, and the Renaissance. These timelines have stayed on our hallway wall all year. 3. Historical fiction:  We read novels set in the time and place that we are currently studying.  Because I have a boy, I have chosen action-oriented books that a boy would like, usually involving wars and fighting.  As a result, history is my son's favorite subject.  This gives us a much greater feel for the age and makes it "come alive".  The key is finding the right books! It is not always easy to find such books, especially those for boys.   Here is a list of the books we've used. 4. Usborne or Kingfisher history books.  These popular books have a lot of graphics and are written in chronological order, so we use them as reference tools. I also found the following two books very enlightening, though probably not something you would read to a child.  Instead, I have incorporated some of what I learned in these books in my history discussions. 1. "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond.  A powerful explanation for why advanced civilizations arose where they did (locations of favorable wild grain and animals species that could be easily domesticated), and how the resultant population increases in these locations lead to the growth of cities, social stratification, new diseases, and advances in technology, even though such populations were often less healthy and happy than hunter-gatherers living in low-population areas. 2. "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong." by James W. Loewen.  Self explanatory title!