History Books

Much though I like the idea of the classical approach to history — going through the whole chronology in four years, and repeating that three times at increasing depth — I have to admit that we haven’t found our stride yet.

My girls have been doing ancient history this year. The Story of the World has worked well for my first grader. But for my fourth grader, who’s learning the material for the second time, it’s feeling very redundant. Early in the year we tried using the Tapestry of Grace reading list, but partly for philosophical reasons, and partly for practical ones (it felt scattered and lacked a unifying narrative “spine”), we abandoned it and returned to Story of the World I along with the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia.

But we’re finding that for fourth grade, the Kingfisher actually adds very little to what SOTW has to say about the respective periods. The idea is that the fourth grade student is supposed to learn how to read the encyclopedia and outline the material. For us, that has meant she writes down one fact per paragraph (the content isn’t really detailed enough to do more than that), and it feels so disjointed that she ends up continuing to produce summaries. It goes a little better if I come up with some kind of writing prompt, but my prompts usually have more to do with interpreting than merely reporting, which is (theoretically) what a fourth grader is supposed to be mastering.

It also feels a little bit like “bait and switch” to me. We started with Story of the World, inculcating a love of history as a story. To switch to the encyclopedia, where history is a rundown of facts rather than a continual narrative, has deflated some of the joy for her. (The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in this family…) It broke my heart a few weeks ago to hear her say, in response to her grandmother asking her what her favorite subject was, “I don’t think I have one anymore. It used to be history, but now that’s just pages, pages, pages.” (She forgets how much supplemental reading we do — or that this counts as “history” too. She’s focused on the central text work.)

So I’m hunting for another narrative — in the spirit of Story of the World, but written for a slightly older child who’s ready for more detail. (The “Moderns” Story of the World was written for fourth grade; we did it last summer. That’s about the level I’m looking for — except focusing on earlier historical periods.)

Any recommendations out there? I have read a fair part of Gombrich’s Little History of the World and I like the tone, but I’m not sure it’s quite detailed enough. I’ll be revisiting the library copy this week. Over at the Ambleside website, I saw The Story of Mankind listed, and I’m going to peruse the library copy of that as well.

I don’t mind using the encyclopedia, but if at all possible I’d prefer to use a narrative as our connective spine — one a 9-10 year old can read for herself to supply a context for the raw information an encyclopedia can provide.

Not that it’s all about the books, when all is said and done. It’s about having internalized enough of the material to be able to make those comparisons between present-day events and things that happened in history — comparisons that our kids make matter-of-factly and amaze their moms. The fact that the path to knowledge feels like drudgery at times doesn’t mean they’re not learning. But I want to make it as enjoyable as possible, and to choose materials that help them retain that conception of world history as a complex, fascinating, dramatic story.