Teach Ancient History (& so much more) with Games, Timeline & a Thesaurus

We love studying History, especially Ancient History and beside Geography, History is one of our favorite subjects in our homeschool. So what happens when you are asked to review a super awesome and complete set where you can pretty much create and use so much to learn History and not just that, but many other subjects? You answer “Yes,” of course!

I am so excited to be using IEW’s (Institute for Excellence in Writing) Resource Set. It includes Timeline of Classics, Teaching with Games Set and A Word Write Now. Each book is spiral-bound and the Games book includes a DVD with tutorials on how all the games are played.

So, since I had these three wonderful resources, I decided to use them all together in one big unit over using each one separately. I looked each books over and watched the entire DVD. I thought and pondered and one game in particular caught my attention. It was the Ancient Artifact Dig. I’d like to call it: Ancient History Timeline game. You can see it in the pictures below.

My son and I put it together. I laminated it and we played and played and played. Even Dad joined in! This game was simple, but it made it easy to not only learn about civilizations and events that took place, but also the order in which these civilizations flourished.

I then explored Timeline of Classics to find the list of the events that took place during the same events in the game. I found a super long list of resources to use in our studies. It was fantastic! What I did was find some of the books on the list on our shelf and gave a list of some more in the book to our librarian. She had them ready for us by the next day.

I found Timeline of Classics to be an invaluable list that we will use during our entire homeschool “career.” It covers human civilizations from the beginning of man all the way to our day. I can’t believe how easy our History lessons will be now!

Last but not least, my oldest and I sat together to listen to the Odyssey (audiobook) as we followed along in our History book. After we were done, I used A Word Write Now to study our two main characters: Odysseus and the Cyclops. I opened A Word Write Now to the page about Courage and we filled it out, thinking about Odysseus and how brave he was during his adventures.

Next, we used the page on Hostility and filled it out thinking about the Cyclops and how antagonistic he was in the story. My son definitely learned a lot more by using this book, over just talking about the characters. This book makes the child think and provides so much information and resources to expand his horizons.

In all honesty, I don’t think I could choose one book over another! Seriously! I would definitely recommend getting the entire resource set. It is definitely worth it!