Long, Long ago...

Long, Long ago there were no houses, apartments, stores, cars or airplanes.  There were no books or televisions.  No cities, no towns, farms or villages.  People lived in the wild!  This is a subject that most children do not have much background information on.  The Story of Civilization by: Nicholas Harris makes those years come to life. 

In this Social Studies picture book the people live in caves and tents.  They learn to trap and hunt for food.  The people discover fire to keep them warm and cook their food.  They had to move around to hunt for food.  Their hunting gear was spears made from materials around them.  After a while, they discovered seeds and how to grow wheat for flour.  After this discovery, there was no need to move around to hunt for food.  They could live in one place and farm all year long.  This made the first villages.  The book goes on to tell how they found metal and how they heated it to make different shapes.  They had invented a new way to make tools. All of their new discoveries created new jobs for the people.  As people gathered together to work, towns were formed. They begin to swap their goods at markets.  As they gathered, different languages were formed and people began to worship different gods.  Athletes competed to see who was the fastest and people became educated.  This grew the knowledge of people so they begin to research to see how life could be improved.  This led them to learn how to construct buildings. It later tells how cars were invented and how doctors began to treat patients.  The book tells of people going into space and finally with our world today! 

This is a very lengthy book that would need to be read over a period of time.  It is very beneficial because of the amount of history and time periods it covers.  It has beautiful illustrations which makes it more interesting than a textbook to obtain the information.  In my opinion, it would wow the children to know the difference in life from back then until now.  Many writing activities could coordinate with this book!  It will be a tool that I use to teach social studies in my future classroom!