Wide Eyed Editions ISBN 9781847809636 £12.99
What a great idea, and what a lovely book. Take 10 ancient societies and draw a big double page spread illustrating the time/period/way of life. Insert 20 anomalies, or inappropriate historical items on each spread. Ask the children to find all the mistakes [they can always check the correct answers on the following page!]. This is a great way to help children discover a real sense of period, of what it was really like to live in the Stone Age, or Roman times. My children had great fun – and much laughter – as they found the mistakes; most were obvious but some much more testing. Having said all that, I do have a couple of minor quibbles with this book. One or two of the mistakes appear where the pages fold and are thus difficult to identify, even when I cheated and looked at the answer page. Six out of the ten societies figure in the 2014 National Curriculum for History for Key Stage 2 – it would have been easy to make all ten appropriate. But my biggest quibble is with the timeline contents page. It would have been so easy to make the timeline really accurate in order to give children a clear impression of who lived when, and in relation to other societies they have studied – that too is part of the ‘Big Picture’ of history children need to develop. Having said that I still think this deserves a place in every school history collection. Well done.
Alf Wilkinson, The Historical Association
