Finding Good Books Just Got Easier: Exploring Heritage History

 

I can’t even begin to tell you how many conversations I’ve had in recent months with my mom, my sisters, my friends, my poor husband and anyone else willing to listen as I lament about the increasing lack of quality books to be found in the library.

It seems to take forever for my kids to locate books that aren’t pure pablum.  As I’ve mentioned before, intentionally looking for books that don’t erase our Christian heritage in this country or don’t contain modern interpretations and objectional content can be a challenge too.

I love to buy books, especially old books. There is something about their smell, the rich language, the engaging story and inspiring characters who I would actually love my kids to admire and emulate. They don’t write books like they used to write them…

So I leapt at the opportunity to check out some books from Heritage History.

Now I don’t get the benefit of the musty smell of old books, but Heritage History has taken the work out of hunting down quality old books and packaged them together in an easy to navigate set of CD’s. They have taken hundreds of amazing books written for children of various ages on a variety of topics relating to Western Civilization and reformatted them into digital format. The result is that this new generation of families can utilize these great books in their homeschooling!

As any of you know who have been reading here long, I’m passionate about learning. When it comes to history, I want it to come alive for my children. I’m a big advocate of hands-on learning, but as I mentioned several years ago, I view our hands-on activities as icing on the cake.

The cake is the content found in books – specifically living books. Stories are such powerful vehicles to help us understand the ebb and flow of history. It helps give context to fact. Story ignites the imagination and often naturally leads into hands-on play where those stories are relived and cemented into young minds.

Knowledge really enhances experience, so as much as I tout hands-on experience and learning through doing, this works best if it comes after or alongside knowledge acquisition.

But if you don’t know where to look to find good books there can be a bit of a problem…

That’s where I’m excited to now incorporate the vast libraries available through Heritage History.

What is Heritage History?

• They are founded on the idea that well-written, age appropriate history books foster a natural interest in history and encourage discovery based on curiosity.

• It is a LIVING-BOOKS based introduction to Western Civilization. They’ve converted 100’s of pre-1923 books into electronic format for us.

• Designed specifically for late elementary-highschool.

• Can be used as a stand alone curriculum or to supplement whatever you are using.

• Each book is formatted for PDF, Kindle or Nook – including the illustrations which you won’t find on the kindle freebies… You get all three options so there is flexibility in how you use them within your family.

• Each CD has books clearly laid out by genre and reading level making it easy to find selections to suit interest and reading level.

• Each of the 5 curriculum cd’s contain study guides, maps, timelines and copy-ready images from the books to further your learning.

Heritage History Might Be a Good Fit for Your Family If:

• You value a literature-based approach to education.

• You don’t have empty bookshelves waiting to be filled with books.

• You want well written books –engaging and rich in vocabulary

• You want quality books without all of the modern politically correct slant.

• You want quality books, but don’t have the time to go find each and every one for every topic you study.

• You want quality books, but don’t want to have to pay a lot. This is one of the most economical ways I’ve ever seen to beef up your library and really feed the mind!

How We Are Using Heritage History:

We are currently exploring books from both the Young Readers Curriculum and the Early America Library.  Xander quickly chose Our Little Viking Cousin for his first book.  While I originally planned to let Xander read this on his own, I noticed a lot of big, new vocabulary words.  We quickly opted to use this as a read-aloud book.  One of my favorite things about reading books on the kindle is the use of the dictionary feature.   Whenever we encountered a word they didn’t know, we’d press down to highlight the word and look it up in the dictionary.

Oh how much fun it’s been to discuss words such as vociferous and cadaverous. {The boys discovered that I really knew what I was talking about when it comes to cadavers after I told them about my two previous jobs teaching a university human anatomy lab and then working for an organ and tissue recovery organization.}  Xander has been reading another book from the collection and has taken up the habit of highlighting words he doesn’t know.  Having the built in dictionary is helpful for him and I’ve loved getting to peek in on the words that he doesn’t know, but wants to understand.

The story took its time building the plot and we had a lot of new vocabulary to tackle, but about halfway through the book, the boys were begging for just one more chapter.  It was full of adventure, suspense and intrigue.  Pretty soon we were pulling out the globe and mapping the route Lief the Lucky took to the new world.  Their imaginations were on fire.  They started peppering me with questions which prompted us to check out a book about Vikings from the library.  Despite the lack of story line, they poured over this and read a good deal of it.  That is the power of a good story!

We had fun taking a break from our normal studies to explore several of these books and are look forward to incorporating them into our KONOS unit studies!

With the couple of books that we’ve read so far and some of the others that I’ve read before in inferior digital form, I’m hooked.  We hope to own their entire collection soon.  I don’t delve into the Greeks and the Romans now, but we plan to go hardcore into this in late junior high/highschool and I’m so excited to have all of these books at my fingertips.

Where Do I Buy Heritage History CD’s?

You have several options:

You can buy one of the 5 curriculum cd’s that includes 45-86 books, study guides, maps, timelines, etc for: Young Readers, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, British Middle Ages, British Empire.

You can purchase one of 4 Heritage Classical Libraries containing 50-80 books each – Early America, Spanish Empire, Christian Europe, Modern Europe.

The curriculum CD’s cost $24.99 and the Libraries are $19.99.  You can buy them in a variety of bundles and save money too! Considering the sheer volume of excellent books to choose from, this is a steal.

You can follow Heritage History on Facebook or Twitter!

Do any of you use tablets or a Kindle to read books to your kids?  I’m excited about the access we have to great books because of new technology? 

{Disclaimer: I was offered these book cd’s for free and compensated for my time invested. All opinions are solely my own after extensively reviewing this and using it in our home. This post contains affiliate links.  I truly appreciate your support of this site.  Please see my disclosure for more information.}