This is the first in a series of five planned volumes (Volume 2 is due out sometime in mid-2004; the first three weeks of lessons are available at www.brightideaspress.com) that cover history from a Christian perspective, starting with Creation and ending with modern times. The course is designed by a homeschool mom for use by home educators. History is split among the five volumes in this way:

Volume I: Creation to the Resurrection (Creation-A.D. 29)
Volume II: The Early Church and the Middle Ages (A.D. 30-1460)
Volume III: The Renaissance and Growth of Empires (1461-1707)
Volume IV: Revolutions and Rising Nations (1708-1914)
Volume V: The World at War and the Present Day (1915-Present Day)

The first volume in the series is massive (about 500 pages) and chock-filled with good things: maps, timeline suggestions, a chapter-by-chapter resource list, activities galore (all very do-able... do you hear me jumping in the air and clicking my heels together with glee? Oh, okay, it was just a mental jump, but the glee is there), quizzes, tests, answer keys, teacher helps, letters to students to whet their appetites for history, and more.

Oh, and lessons, let us not forget the lessons. The book is divided into thirty-six weeks, with three lessons per week. Each lesson begins with a pre-test, which is not so much a test, as the author explains, as a way to introduce the students to the material they'll be studying in the upcoming lesson.

Next comes the lesson itself, consisting of an essay meant to be read together (but written so that a sixth grader could easily read it independently, if need be), followed by activities broken down by age level. Though the book is "aimed" at 4th-8th grades, Mrs. Hobar has included suggestions for teaching from kindergarten level through high school. After every three lessons you will review the people, places and things studied in the lessons. After the review you will find either a quiz or an exercise, which look back over *all* the material studied, not just the three previous lessons. The quizzes are intended to increase retention of the material by recalling to mind topics and names the author feels are worth retaining.

At the beginning of each quarter is a summary that gives an overview of the time period about to be covered and at the end is a quarterly worksheet to sum up all the material studied in the previous 27 lessons. To complete one of these comprehensive worksheets, students go back through the lessons to find the answers to the questions, honing their skills in looking up material. A comprehensive semester test is provided for each semester.

Teacher helps include:

- A letter to the student with a flavor of the author's excitement over the topic, reverence towards God's hand in history, and presentation of the Gospel message
- An overview of the curriculum
- Suggested schedules and adaptations for varying ages
- An introduction to the concept of the classical approach to education (the "Trivium")
- Creating and maintaining a history notebook
- Making and using "Memory Cards", a handy, low-cost review device
- Suggestions for making a timeline (I like this! It is a fold-away timeline that can be put away when you want to reclaim the house for company)
- Tips on grading and record-keeping
- Maps and reproducible pages

Activities range from pencil and paper games to recipes and crafts to suggestions for further research and writing assignments, with ideas for recording all the student's efforts in the history notebook. Thirty-seven pages of mapwork are sprinkled throughout, reinforcing geographical understanding.

The thing I find most exciting about this curriculum is that it incorporates Bible history into the grand scope of history, instead of separating and compartmentalizing into "secular" and "Biblical" people and events. Therefore you will find Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, Abraham, Joseph, and Jesus, just to name a few, studied in context with their historical contemporaries. (Well, perhaps Adam and Eve had no contemporaries, but they appear on the timeline in the beginning of things, right where they belong!)

The author writes from an unabashedly Christian worldview and has evidently done careful research to ensure that the facts presented are as accurate as possible. She urges older students to go to source materials wherever possible, and it is clear that Mrs. Hobar has done the same kind of careful research she advocates. All in all, I highly recommend this to any homeschooler looking for clearly laid-out lesson plans and materials for the chronological study of history.