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I’ve said that being an eclectic homeschooler doesn’t mean that you just throw a bunch of stuff together and hope it works. Every piece of curriculum is chosen, for a reason.

However, I am going to admit that being an eclectic homeschooler does often mean that you have a large variety of materials at your disposal. (Because I like variety. And options.)

That said, I do have a large variety of materials available to study History here at our house. I love History. I didn’t used to, no sir. But as an adult–I think it might be my favorite. And I have a long list of favorites when it comes to materials, too. And yes, I’m going to share them with you.

Everything You Need For Eclectic Homeschool History Curriculum

The Mystery of History

Chosen for: World History
Chosen Because: Chronological, Conversational, Biblical Worldview
Benefits: All inclusive (one book,) low cost, non-consumable

Why do we love it? The things I like most about The Mystery of History are that it’s chronological, with a Biblical Worldview, and it’s great for teaching multiple ages at once. Even though the book itself comes with everything you have to have (and you are allowed to copy it as needed,) I am also a big fan of the digital extras that you can add — like the notebooking pages, for example.

Homeschool Legacy, Once-A-Week Unit Study

Chosen for: American History
Chosen because: Easy to implement, Christian perspective
Benefits: The lessons are prepared, are literature rich, and easy to add on to an already full schedule

Why do we love it? I really love how much literature this adds to our week (and it helps me keep diligent with my library borrowing habits.) The Homeschool Legacy unit studies are written and intended as a complete curriculum in and of themselves, but we use it as an American History supplement. The extra geography, art, etc, that we get out of it is just a sweet bonus. (To learn more about how we use it with our existing curriculum, you can check out my review.)

Heritage History

Chosen for: Historical Literature
Chosen because: Living books, compact “Library” on cd, can read on Kindle
Benefits: learn History, increase vocabulary and reading comprehension, and broaden horizons all at the same time.

Why do we love it? Having a whole library of historical literature at my fingertips makes it really easy to provide living books for my kids to read (or to read to them.) The Heritage History cds don’t take up a lot of space, either. The historical literature also provides a perspective from the time in which they were written, and when we ready books from time periods we’ve covered in History we are excited to find “evidence” of things we studied inside the context of the story. (I wrote about the Young Readers Curriculum here and I also have a post about we supplement our Mystery of History with Heritage History.)

WonderMaps

Chosen for: Geography
Chosen because: Easy to reference, edit, and print maps for History lessons
Benefits: Contains World, American and Biblical maps as well as Maps organized by lesson for The Mystery of History. 

Why do we love it? Aside from the very large resource of maps in one little software program (which is enough to love right there,) the two things I love most about WonderMaps are that I can pull up the Mystery of History Table of Contents and go straight to the map I need (instead of copying the map out of the back of the History book,) and that I can edit the maps before printing them. (Yes, I have a post about WonderMaps, too!)

Our Kindle

Chosen for: Historical Literature
Chosen because: Ease of containing and reading books
Benefits: Works great with Heritage History, not to mention appropriate history-related Kindle freebies 

Why do we love it? I love my Kindle. My grandmother recently gave the girls a used Kindle, too. When I assign digital books to read I can put them on the “Kid Kindle” and they can take it with them wherever they go.

Netflix

Chosen for: Historical Documentaries
Chosen because: Visual learners like to “see” things.
Benefits: Further explore a History subject; appeal to a variety of learning styles.

Why do we love it? Well, first because we like our tv. We watch a lot of movies. But one of the biggest reason I love Netflix is because of the large amount of educational content. Sure, you have to weed out some less than great documentaries but we have found a lot of good ones, too. Documentaries can give you a visual of far away places and people.

And if you need Texas History…

I’ve already written an ultimate list of Texas History Homeschool resources here. Enjoy!

Others:

• Ten Free History Resources
• Geography Literature

I also want to mention that we have a lot of great Usborne books that are History or Geography related. We have several atlases and historical encyclopedias. Having a good collection of reference materials is also good when you want to do further research on a particular subject you have covered in a History lesson. I sort of have an addiction to reference materials. =)

Want more posts like this? Hop over to the “Must Haves” Link-up over at iHomeschool Network to find more “musts” and “faves” on a large variety of homeschool topics!

Some quick and simple disclosures: I am a WonderMaps Brand Ambassador, an Amazon affiliate and an affiliate for Mystery of History and Heritage History. Why? Because I love them so!