Every year I feel like I am refining what the best books for our homeschool look like. I'm learning new things while unlearning or correcting some of the defects of my own history education (that officially ended in high school because I took zero history courses after that).
This year I combed through MANY possible choices for history books and additional or supplemental books for studying a very difficult and lengthy historical period. The books I was seeking needed to be
- Living books, that is full of living ideas and told in a narrative style that doesn't talk down to the student
- Written in a way that represents native people of the Americas, explorers, colonists, and African Americans in a way that I feel good about sharing with my children and matches our family values (aka has the ideas that I want to nourish my children)
- At a reading level that my 2 older students can read (nearly) independently, even given that my middle student is not a strong reader yet.
- Affordable
