Carole P. Roman Book Review

Books, Books, Books! We love books in this house, chapter books, picture books, poetry books, history books, fun fictional books, character building books, we keep a large library of books available for everyone to read. There are books in almost every room of our house.  This month we had the opportunity to review some children’s books by Carole P. Roman. We were blessed to receive three books from the Carole P Roman books and collections. She has several different collections but ours came from her If You Were Me and Lived in… history series.  The three titles that we received were, If You Were Me And Lived In…Tthe American West, If You Were Me and Lived in… Ancient China, and If You Were Me and Lived in… The Ancient Mali Empire.

We started our exploration of these books with a family read aloud. I chose to read If You Were Me And Lived In…Tthe American West for our family read aloud because it was a subject we had recently studies in history. All three children really enjoyed it. The pictures kept the attention of the three year old and the older children enjoyed the story.  There were most impressed that the sister in the story had to collect buffalo poop.

I also wanted to get a feel for how the children would do with the books reading them on their own. Each week they read a book (sometimes they choose and sometimes I assign), complete a journal entry about that book and then conference with me. I assigned the ten and eleven year olds one of the books and had them follow that process. These books are shorter than the books my eleven year old normally reads so it only took him about 20-30 minutes to read the entire book, If You Were Me and Lived in… The Ancient Mali Empire. While this was not a book that challenged his reading abilities, he enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit about the Ancient Mali Empire. He thought that the books were, “good but not long enough”. He found the fact that girls in Ancient Mali were married very young to be one of the most interesting facts that he learned from this book. He went around telling everyone in the family about it that day.

My daughter who is not as fond of long chapter books as my son was delighted to find out that she was getting to read a shorter book that week. She read If You Were Me and Lived in… Ancient China and really enjoyed the book. She was somewhat familiar with Ancient China from our history studies but still learned plenty of new information. She thought that the books were “good with lots of facts and only a little bit of story. ” She learned that parents would have chosen spouses for their daughters and found that very strange. She was also interested in how important ancestors were to the Chinese people.

I liked how she took historical facts and weaved them into a story like presentation. This style of living book seems to keep my children’s attention as well as helping them remember the facts that they are learning. I also really liked how she included a glossary at the back of the book to help them better understand any new vocabulary. We really enjoyed the Carole P. Roman books and collections  and highly suggest that you check them out. I am hoping to add more of the ancient history ones, such as If You Were Me and Lived in…. Ancient Greece,  to our collection before next fall when we will be studying ancient history. There are many more books that other Crew members reviewed so click the link below to check out some other reviews.

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