It all started with House.
House: Showing How People Have Lived Throughout History with Examples Drawn from the Lives of Legendary Men and Women
I bought this book, according to Amazon, on November 18, 2005. That means that Becca was ten months old, Leah had just turned two a few days before, and Natalie was three. WHY, you ask? Because I was determined to be a Waldorf homeschooling mom and someone recommended it on a Yahoo group as being useful for the Housebuilding block.
Fast forward to May 2018. For the first time in thirteen years, I used this book. It has been on my shelf all this time... then I finally got it down for my Housebuilding block and I love it!
So here's what is included (he organizes the book into pairs of houses):
- Sculptor's House, ancient Egyptian workshop
Sculpted House, the Trojan horse
Imperial Grandeur, ancient Roman town house
Modest Beginnings, Jesus of Nazareth
Southern Explorations, Kon-Tiki raft, South America
Northern Explorations, Vikings, North America
Monastic Cell, Martin Luther, Protestant Reformation
Snow House, Inuit igloo
Costume Drama, Elizabeth I, execution of Mary Queen of Scots
A Lively Scene, William Shakespeare, Globe Theater
Country People, peasant cottage in Flanders mid-sixteenth cent.
City People, London Bridge
Dutch Masters, Dutch merchant mid-seventeenth cent.
Slave Ship, triangle trade
Hall of Mirrors, King Louis XIV, Versailles
Starter Home, Puritans in New England
Longhouse, Iroquois
Tent, Bedouin tribes, Arabian Desert
Living in Nature, Amazon rain forest
Shaping Nature, Japan, bonsai
Ingenious Edifice, Thomas Jefferson, Monticello
Palace of Thought, Empress Catherine the Great, Russia
Bachelors' Lair, Sherlock Holmes, Victorian house
Warrior's Corral, Zulu kingdom
Floating Factory, New England whaling voyage
Houseboat, Chinese junks
House and Garden, Claude Monet, Giverny
Room with a View, Frederic E. Church, Hudson River
Tropical Prison, Devil's Island, French Guiana
Hotel on Wheels, Orient Express
Inn Down Under, Australian hotel 1909
Endurance, Ernest Shackleton, Antarctica
Artful Apartment House, Antoin Gaudi, Barcelona
Life in a Trench, World War I bunkers
Musical Mecca, Harlem, Manhattan Island
Southern Roots, New Orleans
Ranches for All, post-World War II suburban housing
Settling In, State of Israel moshavim
Outer Space, Mir space station
Inner Space, child in the womb
Curious to see what else he'd written, I checked out Metropolis. Loved it. Bought it. Again, so useful for so many main lesson blocks!
Metropolis: Ten Cities, Ten Centuries
This is most helpful for Waldorf grades 6, 7, 8.
Here's what's included:
-
The Middle Ages, grade 6
Jerusalem, 11th Century
the First Crusade
Paris, 12th Century
the Cathedral of Notre-Dame
A Mongol Tent City, 12th Century
Genghis Khan
Koblenz, 14th Century
The Black Death / The Plague
The Age of Discovery, grade 7
Voyage of Discovery, 15th Century
Part One: Lisbon
Part Two: Mozambique
Vasco da Gama
Forence, 16th Century
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti
Osaka, 17th Century
Vienna, 18th Century
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The Age of Revolution, grade 8
London, 19th Century
Industrial Revolution, Victorian England
New York City, 20th Century
Excited by his work, I continued to check out books. Amazon had very mixed reviews of The Trojan Horse so I checked it out from the library instead of buying it sight-unseen, and I'm really glad I did. (You can read my two star review at Amazon.) But I also discovered he wrote Journey to Cahokia and that was one I decided to buy after checking it out and reading it.
Journey to Cahokia: A Boy's Visit to the Great Mound City
This is a narrative story about a boy named Little Hawk and although Lorenz clearly did his research, he is not as good at writing fiction as he is at straight non-fiction (in my opinion). I would NOT have bought this book if I didn't live in Illinois, where we teach about and visit Cahokia on a regular basis. But it's fun that my kids can see landmarks they recognize on the map in the introduction, it's useful that it gives more of a sense of what it would be like to walk around in that city when it was at its peak (pair with Bonnie Shemie's Mounds of Earth and Shell), and it is definitely a must-own if you're in Illinois or Missouri and teaching grade 4 Local History & Geography.
Our most recent Albert Lorenz purchase arrived on Tuesday and this one I did buy sight-unseen based on the glowing Amazon reviews. It's out of print so you have to get used copies and mine was missing the magnifying glass, so be prepared for that. It's called Buried Blueprints and I could barely get my 14 year old daughter to give it up so that I could write this blog post. She LOVES the detail in the illustrations (thus the magnifying glass).
Buried Blueprints: Maps and Sketches of Lost Worlds and Mysterious Places
She's obsessed with this creative look at history, mystery, and mythology. So here's what's included in the elaborately illustrated fold out sections:
- The Garden of Eden
Atlantis
Noah's Ark
The Tower of Babel
An Egyptian Chronicle
Giza, Pharaoh Ramses II,
Moses and Aaron, the Exodus
King Solomon's Mines
The Odyssey
"I got the material for this drawing from a blind street singer in Athens named Homer."
Man Against Woman
Emperor Titus, Roman gladiators, Colosseum, Pompeii
The Seven Cities of Gold
de Vaca, de Coronado, Eldorado
The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merry Men
King John, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Crusades
The Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
Genghis Khan and the Great Wall of China
Dracula's Castle
Dinosaur Island
Professor George Edward Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World
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2 comments:
Love these suggestions! Just requested several from the library. Give us a shout if you are going to Cahokia - we would love to meet up with you guys. :)
Yes absolutely!
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