We've found "Augustus Caesar's World" by Genevieve Foster to be a wonderful resource. The book covers the period from 44 BC to 14 AD with events and ideas for that time, all over the world. I feel the stories really give my son a great sense of life during this period. The illustrations are outstanding line drawing of characters, maps and especially the time lines. Just wanted to share a great resource.
Jeanne Bendick's second title in Bethlehem Books' "Living History" series (after Archimedes and the Door of Science) brings to life the 2nd century (A.D.) Roman doctor whose work in learning to understand the human body became the standard authority on human physiology for over a thousand years. Although many of his theories were corrected through advancements in science since the middle ages, his story is interesting both for its own sake and for the light is sheds on Roman history and culture and the Hippocratic tradition of medicine.
Madeleine Takes Command is a story of heroism. Based on a true account in the winter 1692-93 in the wilderness of French Canada, fourteen-year-old Madeleine, along with her brothers, twelve-year-old Louis and ten-year-old Alexandre, hold down the fort against a raiding Iroquois party.
Our first year of homeschooling we used a dry textbook for American history. Well, we didn't really use it - we put it off as much as possible and the year passed with only the first few chapters read.
Our second year of homeschooling, we discovered Greenleaf's Famous Men series (through enrolling in the Kolbe Academy Home Study program). What a difference! It was our first exposure to literature-based history study, and the idea of studying time periods through "real books" was a formative one in our homeschool.
The Greenleaf Guide to Famous Men of Rome is an optional supplement for the book. It includes, for each lesson, a vocabulary list and several discussion questions designed to bring out the key points of each biography through a Christian (biblical) perspective. The discussion questions are excellent narration starters and really do help bring out the theme that "individual people and their actions have a significant effect on history".
This Bethlehem Budget Book contains two books in one softcover volume: Old Sam, Thoroughbred Trotter (copyright 1955) and Old Sam and the Horse Thieves (copyright 1967).
This is a somewhat unusual, but highly rewarding story of a half-wild woodsman (who "lived by the woods. He had no trade, he couldn't farm a lick or keep a store or run a tavern. All he knew to do was follow the bear and deer through the woods and sleep in caves and hollow trees.") and his eleven year old son Caje. Caje and his father travel through the wilderness - living off the land and escaping from unfriendly Indians. Although Caje would love to settle down in a real house among civilized people, his father is happier in the woods and frets about being "beholden to others".
An interesting, fully illustrated (with pen and ink drawings) story of the construction of a Medieval Cathedral. The cathedral in the book and the details of the story are fictional, but are based on details of what we know about the construction of real-life cathedrals. (Among other reasons, this technique makes sense because there probably aren't enough details known about the construction of any one Cathedral to make a book of this sort).
This is a children's story book about a fictional, but historically accurate, medieval feast (appropriate to about 1400 A.D.). The story starts from the very beginning, when the lord and lady of a manor receive notice that the King would be visiting for a few days. We see what immense preparations would start long before his arrival and the concern on the part of those hosting the feast because the king wouldn't be travelling alone - the queen, knights, squires and members of the court would make the feast a large and somewhat worrisome preparation.
This story is told in the style of a journal written by a ten year old girl who travels by wagon train with her parents and her twelve year old brother from St. Joseph, Missouri to Fort Laramie (Wyoming) in 1860. The author relates a very detailed account of how life was lived on a highly organized wagon train (and some comparisons with one that was slopped together and suffered great difficulties from it). We also see the growth of character in the family (particularly the mother) who must accustome themselves to hard labor and ignoring their previous station in society.