Shiny
Fearless
Free
The Tank defying gravity:
Babypie (Strawberry Pie?) engaging in wanton consumerism (shh…don’t tell her it’s empty):
Captain Science throwing down, earthbending-style:
As a secular homeschooler, I have a deep fondness for DK Publishing. I wasn’t interested in purchasing a boxed history curriculum, even if one I felt was both adequately rigorous and completely secular were available to me. Instead, I chose to pick a main text for developing a timeline and use supporting texts and other resources (websites, field trips, fiction stories, mythology trivia cards, etc.) to supplement. The books from DK Publishing have largely filled that need.
Here are a few DK texts we’ve used so far this year:
History: The Definitive Visual Guide provides the spine for our history curriculum. This book uses secular dating (BCE/CE) and doesn’t couch history in terms of religious events. As the title suggests, this text is visually stunning, with full color pictures of settings, people, and artifacts. Each section starts with a timeline of important events. The chapters are fairly information-dense, which makes this book appropriate for strong readers of the logic stage and up. The book does leave some gaps in knowledge. Overall cultural accomplishments are well covered, but many important events and people receive too small a mention. For example, Ancient Greece, I couldn’t find a single reference to the Battle of Thermopylae. Make sure you read through each section and choose appropriate supplemental materials for the thin areas. On the whole, however, it’s a much deeper look into each time period than any other history book I considered for our spine — it beats the singularly nonsecular Kingfisher history hands-down and is better than the Usborne for an older student.
The Eyewitness series is one of our best sources of supplemental reading. Thus far, we’ve used Eyewitness: Mesopotamia, Eyewitness: Ancient Greece, and are beginning Eyewitness: Ancient Rome. These books provide detailed information about the arts, technologies, daily life, clothing, and other cultural aspects of each time period. They, too, have many wonderful illustrations with detailed captions and each has a pull out full-color poster with important terms, events, people, and other details. We like to put our posters up right by Captain Science’s workspace. They also come with clip-art CDs, which we haven’t used, but might in the future. I have to say, both Eyewitness: Mesopotamia and Eyewitness: Ancient Greece contained more information than I remember learning about either culture until at least high school, and possible college, in the case of Mesopotamia. The books are written for children around age 8+, so it’s easy for children to engage with the material, but it’s by no means dumbed-down or overly simplistic. The biggest down side of using these as a school text was that Captain Science would sneak off with them and read them straight through instead of waiting on each lesson.
Many of the sections in the Eyewitness books match up well topically with History: The Definitive Visual Guide. When we covered Alexander the Great, Captain Science read the sections in both books, which presented the information in two slightly different ways and presented a nicely rounded picture of this famous ruler. The sections on science and medicine in both books matched up nicely, too. I’m looking forward to seeing if Eyewitness: Ancient Rome and the chapters in History have the same degree of parity.
All in all, you can consider this post my love letter to DK Publishing, because I’ve been very pleased with everything I’ve purchased so far. Even better, because these aren’t books aren’t published specifically for homeschoolers, I’ve been able to find them in my local book stores and use coupons and my educator discounts on them! Nothing like inexpensive, secular, quality texts to make a history-loving homeschooler a happy mama!
