Heritage History: A Review

History is one of my favorite things!  I loved it as a child in school, I loved it in college--even with the most boring of teachers--and I still love it today, whether I'm reading it in a book or learning at a national historic site or watching a historical film, it's just so interesting!  Now that I'm a homeschool mom, I love learning more about history with my kiddos, too.  And, thankfully, they also love it!  We have always done history as a family, reading a lot together, and we love it that way.  

Heritage History is founded on classical children's history books and "the belief that well-written, age-appropriate history books could be of such natural interest that with sufficient guidance, many students can actually 'teach themselves' history."  It's style is of the Charlotte Mason theories, taking a living book approach rather than a textbook approach.  With living books, the learning is from a narrative point rather than analytical and can draw the student into a love of history much more so, I believe.  This type of study encourages students to follow their interests and purse them further on their own while learning even more.  Heritage History's primary goal is not to insist upon a set of events or stories that every student needs to know, but instead to engage their interest so much so as to instill a life-long love of history.  

Heritage History offers an amazing online library of historical books--over 400 titles!  They are sorted by genre, author, series and civilization.  They are also listed according to reading levels, as well.  Their online library also includes thousands of historical images, a database of historical characters, and a complete battle dictionary.  However, to make their books accessible offline they offer their curriculum cd's (like the one we received) with preselected collections pertaining to a specific time period.  

I was excited to receive Heritage History British Middle Ages curriculum which incorporated perfectly with our current history on the Middle Ages.  Included in this cd is the user guide, teaching aids, over 60 maps, and more than 50 pieces of literature.  

Heritage Classical Curriculum provides a wonderful foundation for understanding Western Civilization: Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, British Middle Ages, the British Empire, and their Young Readers curriculum.  They are limited to books published before 1923 however, and also do not have any assigned learning activities.  Because of these limitations, they do not promote themselves as a complete curriculum and encourage collaboration with other history programs.  

For instance, we use The Story of the World for our history and are currently in Volume II which is The Middle Ages, so this particular Heritage History curriculum was a wonderful bonus to our history study.  We were able to pause in our SOTW book and take a nice meander through the British Middle Ages and dig a little deeper into that time in history with Heritage History while our Story of the World activity book provided many additional things for us to add to that.  

I was incredibly impressed with just how many historical children's stories are offered in this one cd.  We thoroughly enjoyed reading many of them.  They brought history alive to us, especially the stories of knights and princesses--the kiddos LOVED those!  

The British Middle Ages cd is a reasonable price of $24.99, as are each of their cd's--or you can buy all 5 of them for $99.99--that's like getting one for free!  Plus, all of the books included in these cd's are presented in both printable (pdf) and ereader (EPUB and MOBI) formats so you can download these to any electronic reading device.  They also offer a sample book for you to look at here and a sample of one of their Curriculum User Guides here.

If you're looking to add to your family library, supplement your current history curriculum or dive deeper into history, this might be just what you're looking for.  So head over to Heritage History and check them out!

You can also go here to read what other homeschool families thought about this curriculum.

Disclaimer:  I received this curriculum cd through The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew and Heritage History in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion.