Story of the World Volume 1 Basic Package

The Story of the World is a 4-volume series that will get you EXCITED about history! The engaging narrative guides you, story-by-story, through chronological world history—providing important context to make history relatable AND memorable for kids. Each level consists of a Text, Activity Book, and optional Tests and Audio CD. History’s overarching story is broken up as follows:

Volume 1: Ancient Times covers history from the earliest Nomads to the last Roman Emperor

Volume 2: Middle Ages spans the Dark Ages through the Renaissance

Volume 3: Early Modern Times extends from the Holy Roman Empire to the Gold Rush

Volume 4: Modern Age covers history from the Victorian Empire to the fall of the USSR

This series makes for an excellent homeschool world history curriculum. Perfect for multi-level learning, short chapters in each Text are wonderful to read aloud as a family or can be read independently by older students. Black-and-white illustrations and maps throughout each volume enhance learning, and appendix sections provide a timeline, list of included maps, and pronunciation guide to people, places, and events in the book. Optional Audio CDs allow you to listen to the text as read by Jim Weiss, a professional storyteller.

The Text is not a traditional textbook. Rather, it contains the reading material for this history curriculum and it is intended to be used alongside the Activity Book to complete a full and well-rounded one-year history and geography study.

After reading through a chapter in the Text, simply flip to the corresponding chapter in the Activity Book and choose from the options available to find what best fits your child’s needs and learning style. For example, there are comprehension questions, narration exercises, map and geography activities, coloring pages, suggested additional history and literature readings, and multi-sensory projects to reinforce the reading in the text. You get to choose!

There are about 150 consumable student pages in each activity book. These include the coloring sheets, maps, games, and other paper activities, which are reproducible within families, though extra sets of Student Pages are available for purchase.

Each activity book also contains many hands-on projects that are user-friendly and allow kids to experience history in unique ways! They will have the chance to do everything from building a hut to making their own cuneiform tablets, mummifying a chicken, baking an African or Greek feast, creating purple dye, erupting a volcano, making an Olympic wreath, crafting a Native American sand painting, and much more!

The optional Tests and Answer Key book offers a test, with answers, for each chapter.

Story of the World curriculum is flexible! Although designed for elementary students in grades 1-4, the text is often used by older students, along with the map work, additional readings, and other exercises in the Activity Book, which can extend the learning to a much higher level. You decide how much to do!

If you are looking for bundles containing curriculum essentials, we’ve got you covered. We offer packages tailored to every Story of the World volume:

-          Basic Packages include the Text, Activity Book, and Tests

-          Combo Packs add Student Pages to the Basic Package

-          Complete Packages include the Text, Activity Book, Tests, and Audio CDs.

If you would like to purchase all four Text volumes at once, we provide Sets both in hardcover and softcover. A set of all four Audio CDs is also available. 

Subtitled "From the Earliest Nomads to the Last Roman Emperor," this volume covers early writing and farming, ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, the Hebrew people, Babylonians, Assyrians, ancient India, ancient China, ancient Africa, Phoenicians, Ancient Greeks, Persia, the Roman empire, the collapse of the Roman empire, early Christianity, Attila the Hun and other barbarians. Volume One was revised in 2006 and now features more illustrations, maps, several timelines and additional parent/teacher notes. The text is available in either paperback and hardcover, and the Activity Book is a bound paperback.