The Modern Age

The final book in the series by Susan Wise Bauer's, The Story of the World, is volume four and it covers world history from Britain's empire to the end of the twentieth century and the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union. This is roughly 1850-2000. It is designed to be used by students in grades 4-8 and ably illustrates the vast changes that took place over those 150 years. The downfall of empires, the rise of new countries, the dark shadow of Stalin, Hitler, civil war, the death of czars and the rise of communism and socialism are all covered in detail in this volume. It is 503 pages long with appendices and indices and has a very handy timeline that I referred to endlessly as I tried to keep the revolutions and tyrants and political changes straight in my head so that I could teach them to my homeschooling students.
Activity Book Four: The Modern Age is formatted in the same manner that her other volumes are with the exception of a couple of new additions; an outlining exercise that is meant to reinforce the student's knowledge of the chapter covered, a timeline project for each chapter, a memorization challenge and more in depth geography work. These changes reflect the age of the students studying this material, but would not be daunting for the fourth graders that it is recommended for. In fact, I think that as the student gets older you can up the ante, so to speak, and make each of her projects more in depth and, perhaps, engaging for the specific age and ability of your student(s).
As with the other Activity Books, the accompanying history and literature reading suggestions are here, as are the maps and projects such as cooking a meal from a particular region of the world. She has also included some science activities and a writing and research project for each of the chapters.
We used this as our core history curriculum and based our literature studies off her suggested readings during our middle-school years and I, for one, was very sad when we aged out of this series and had to move on. Fortunately, Susan Wise Bauer has published three history books for adults and is working on her fourth! We'll review them here in the future!


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