• Develops literacy, vocabulary!
• Introduces & explores the history of great writing
• Introduces many of the greatest writers & their works!
• Fun, hands-on activities!
• Develops critical thinking skills!
• Works well for any-aged student developing literacy!
• Lesson plans are complete and ready to use!  Start now!

My son and I just completed History III lesson 12, Understanding Life- Biology, Darwin, Theophrastus, Linnaes, and Vavilov. What struck me during the time my son and I read and understood the lesson was, the number of children being educated these days that study subjects, that seem to exist by themselves and that have little relevance to each other. It is no wonder why history, math or science is boring to most children. What my son and I just experienced was a vocabulary, geography, history and science lesson with a lab, all rolled into one! We learned what biology is, but we learned it in terms of the first scientists, and so we now know something about the passion they had for their subjects. Imagine being a scientist and guarding a seed vault from starving people in St Petersberg during a 900 day siege during WWII or as the Russian's call it, the great patriotic war. That is history and science coming alive! My son concluded his lesson by going outdoors, into the world to catalog and record the life he found around the house. He didn't leave anything out. A is getting a REAL education, thanks to your insight and effort to produce the best curriculum available today.  Thanks    R.P/, "Father of A."
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This is the final History course for Step 2 students, ages 7-8, and students of any age who are developing literacy.  This course is designed to intensively expand vocabulary for a student who already reads well for his age.

The history of great writing is covered in some detail, with dozens and dozens of writers explored, each with samples of their works, hard words defined in advance!  Dozens of links lead the student to films of great writers works.  From the early Greeks such as Homer, Sophocles and Aristophanes, through the great Roman poets like Dante, the masterful Chinese poets Li Bai and Du Fu, Islamic poets like Gibran; through Shakespeare, Twain, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Keats, Moliere...a parade of the greatest writers are discussed, sampled and compared.  

The course requires a lot of reading, and acts as a stepping stone toward Step 3, while teaching about history and literature.

Subjects included in this course:

• What a writer and poet is
• Homer
• Sappho, Pindar, Aesop and other Greek writers
• The Greeks give birth to tragedy and comedy
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes
• The first historians, Herodotus and Thucydides
• Great Roman Writers like Plautus, Seneca, Terence, Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Juvenal
• Dante
• Chines poets Li Po and Du Fu
• Islamic Poets Omar Khayyam and Rumi
• Kahlil Gibran
• Cervantes and Don Quixote de la Mancha
• Spanish poets Calderon and de Vega
• Shakespeare
• The French Golden Age
• Moliere
• Corneille and Racine
• Voltaire
• Christopher Marlowe
• Ben Jonson
• William Congreve
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• Oscar Wilde
• George Bernard Shaw
• Modern British playwrights Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard
• Chaucer
• Sir Walter Scott
• Jane Austen
• The Brontes
• Great British poets Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Coledridge, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Browning
• The birth of Science Fiction
• Jules Verne
• H.G. Wells
• Charles Dickens
• Mark Twain
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Rudyard Kipling
• British writers Hardy, Forster, Joyce, Rowling
• Alexander Pushkin
• Russian novelists Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
• Anton Chekhov
• Henrick Ibsen
• Emile Zola

(Note – these final semester history courses can be done in any order, as they deal with the lives of artists. That said, they are shaped to continue developing literacy, and grow more difficult when done in sequence in terms of the reading required.)