Academic excellence 5-8 History and Great Books Recommendations
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE, 5-8:
History and Great Books recommendations
The basic text for history is the Kingfisher History Encyclopedia, available through major bookstores or from Rainbow Resource Center (1-888-841-3456):
I. The divisions of history:
Ancients, BC 5000 to 400 AD
Medieval/Early Renaissance, 400-1600 AD
Late Renaissance/Early Modern, 1600-1850
Modern Times, 1850-Present Day
II. Useful places to find age-appropriate rewrites of classic texts, along with other history supplements:
Rainbow Resource Center, 1-888-841-3456
American Home-School Publishing, 1-800-684-2121
Greenleaf Press, 1-800-311-1508
III. Authors and books to look for:
ANCIENTS (fifth grade)
Look for adaptations, biographies, and historical novels by and about:
Confucius
Chinese and Japanese folk-tales
Ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry
Myths of ancient Egypt
Tales of the pharoahs
The Bible
Moses, Abraham, David, Solomon, Esther, Ruth
Homer
Buddha
Socrates
Aristotle
Alexander the Great
Roman emperors
The Iliad and The Odyssey
Greek and Roman myths
Aesop’s Fables
Indian folk-tales and African folk-tales
Cicero and Virgil
MEDIEVAL/EARLY RENAISSANCE
(sixth grade)
Look for adaptations, biographies, and historical novels by and about:
St. Augustine
Geoffrey Chaucer
Erasmus
Edmund Spenser
Roger Bacon
Sir Thomas More
John Donne
William Shakespeare
Martin Luther
Thomas Wyatt (try stories of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn)
Dante
Thomas Malory
John Knox
John Calvin
Rene Descartes
Also search for adaptations/versions of these specific works:
Beowulf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales
The Fairy Queen (includes St. George and the Dragon)
The Inferno
L’Morte d’Arthur (“The Death of Arthur,” includes most Arthurian stories and T. H. White’s novels)
The plays of Shakespeare
LATE RENAISSANCE/EARLY MODERN (seventh grade)
Look for adaptations, biographies, and historical novels by and about these writers. Many seventh graders can also manage original works.
Daniel Defoe
John Bunyan
John Milton
Alfred Lord Tennyson
William Wordsworth
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Charles Dickens
Jane Austen
Edward Lear
Percy Bysse Shelley
Mary Shelley
Christina Rossetti
Lewis Carroll
Mark Twain
James Fenimore Cooper
Frederick Douglass
Jules Verne
Herman Melville
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
William Blake
MODERN (eighth grade)
Pick and choose from this basic literature list.
FICTION
Kidnapped or Treasure Island, Stevenson
“Man Without a Country,” Edward Hale
Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle
The Jungle Book, Kipling
The Time Machine or The War of the Worlds, Wells
The Call of the Wild, London
Father Brown stories, Chesterton
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baronness Orczy
Any short stories of O. Henry
Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery
Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
Strong Poison, Dorothy Sayers
The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
POETRY
“The Song of Hiawatha,” Longfellow
“The Road Not Taken” and other poems, Frost
Collected poems of e. e. cummings
Poems 1919-1934, Walter de la Mare
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems (Knopf 1994),
Langston Hughes
DRAMA
“The Importance of Being Earnest,” Oscar Wilde
“Pygmalion,” George Bernard Shaw
“The Crucible,” Arthur Miller
“A Man for All Seasons,” Robert Bolt
ALSO LOOK FOR BIOGRAPHIES OF AND WORKS BY THE FOLLOWING WRITERS (as may be appropriate for your child’s maturity level):
Beatrix Potter
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Francis Hodgson Burnett
J. D. Wyss
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Alexander Dumas
Willa Cather
Wilfred Owen
Thomas Hardy
Carl Sandburg
Isaac Bashevis Singer
W. Somerset Maugham
T. S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sinclair Lewis
Amy Lowell
Ernest Hemingway
W. B. Yeats
Pearl S. Buck
Robert Lowell
Isaac Asimov
A. A. Milne
Toni Morrison
