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We recently completed a short stone age topic here and I thought I would share the books that we used for this study. Some of these books were gifted to us and others are ones that I bought or we have had for a while. Links to the books are affiliate links and you can learn more here about this.
Why the Stone Age?
The children are ever interested in History and I thought the Stone Age seemed like a good place to start with that study. I thought it would be a nice entry point into future history projects as the children start to build a timeline for themselves.
General Factual Books
I like to have a few subject-specific books and we had some great ones for this Stone Age topic. The main ones that we used were:
- DK Find out! Stone Age
- History Detectives: Stone Age to Iron Age
- The Genius of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages.
These three books did a great job of explaining ideas to the children as well as providing a framework to work through as we learned about the different aspects of the Stone Age.
They’re all well written with lots of great clear images and they complemented each other well. D enjoyed reading these and Em enjoyed using them to help to re-affirm the things we had talked about during our studies.
We also used the Time Travel Guides – The Stone Age and Skara Brae which is more specific to the settlement of Skara Brae and we really enjoyed this book – it’s perfect for a Skara Brae topic and this was well used by all three children as we watched videos and read about the settlement together. It’s brilliantly done.
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Other Topic Books
Here are some other more general books that supported our Stone Age learning including:
These are all lovely books and we used these to look at how the animal population was different from what we might expect to see now. They are all really well done with expert information and excellent illustration. I plan to do a bigger project on extinct animals at some stage (possibly later this year) and these will be a great set of books to link to that, as well as helping to re-cap the history learning with the Stone Age project.
Supplementary Chapter Books
I really love that the children are at the age of being able to enjoy historical fiction; seeing the stories interwoven with historical fact is a great way to bring the topic to life for them.
The books they particularly enjoyed included:
- Horrible Histories – Savage Stone Age
- Cave Girl (a fun early reader)
- Stone Age Tales (there are four of these that we have and they are superb and were short reads for my older two)
- The Wild Way Home
The Stone Age Tales by Terry Deary were great and really linked to some of the themes we covered during our topic. The Great Cave, in particular, worked really well and I liked that the books also included ideas to further the study too. These have been read a few times by Daniel and he had really enjoyed them Terry Deary writes some great books and these, in particular, were perfect for bringing the subject to life for us.
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Daniel also enjoyed The Wild Way Home and finished this pretty quickly. He has encouraged his sister to read it, but she is finishing off another book right now but I am sure she will get to it soon. It’s also a book I want to read myself so we may well share it as a read-aloud soon.
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as long as they dont start experienting with flints/sparks/fires …