Bede's History of ME

I really like this book. It's a great introduction to the concept of history and time (history over time). Some areas could be an issue if your family isn't entirely "traditional" (if you yourself dont know your parents, if your child is adopted, etc).
I'm not entirely sure how we will address these issues...and unfortunately it makes things complicated.

I dislike this book. I purchased both Bede's History of Me, and History of US for my kindergarten curriculum. I do like that History of Me explains timelines well and is in color, and has easy to understand content. However, the negatives outweigh the positives in this book. I had to edit a lot of the content, including omitting entire sections. Now, of course, this is just my opinion. There are probably many people who are perfectly fine with the whole book, but it's not for our Christian family. I dislike that the only mention of "Jews" in the entire book was in a sentence that said "Jesus was arrested and taken to an illegal Jewish court." While true, why does it have to specify that its Jewish? Nowhere in the book does it say that Jesus and his family were Jews or anything nice about Jews. With the overwhelming hostility that Jews face in the world, this makes me somewhat uncomfortable. The instructions with the illegal Jewish court sentence are to draw a sword on a timeline. Other things to draw on this particular timeline are a whip and a skull. Of course, I have no problem with teaching the story of the death and resurrection of Christ, but why those symbols? Jesus drove the animals out of the Temple with a whip, but this book just says "Jesus chased the money-changers out of the Temple." and has the child draw a whip. Jesus is LOVE. He never whipped anyone. I also dislike that on the Church History timeline, they talk about how Boniface was a missionary who met people who worshipped trees, "so he chopped one down and built a church out of it." How is this showing God's love? It just looks like hypocritical Christian intolerance. Instead of spreading love and the message of Jesus, we come into someone else's land, and destroy something that is religiously important to them? Then we celebrate this? How would we feel if someone went to the Holy Land, and built idols out of our Holy relics? What does this say about us as Christians? How does showing such blatant disrespect to a different culture help befriend them so we can show them the Truth and the Light? I really hope Timberdoodle decides to use a different history book series. Again, this is heavily based on my own opinion and religious views. I just don't like this book, and I wouldn't recommend.

I was not sure when I ordered this what we would think of it, but as soon as I pulled it out, my daughter was smitten with Bede. She does not want to stop after one lesson. She has also decided it would be a good idea to glue googly eyes all around the house. Looks like we'll need to order Bede's History of US next. Once again I feel grateful for the years of expertise that led the Timberdoodle team to include this in their K curriculum. Thank you!

Moves from personal to familial, from you house to your neighborhood then state country and world. What a great way to ground a child.

This book had some good topics and activities, but also had some pages that were just not very interesting or engaging on their own. We had to supplement it by looking up pictures or videos or music clips online to make it more engaging. I also had trouble with the disjointed way the topics were arranged. Overall, the flow of the book just didn't make much sense.