I decided this year to teach my oldest son church history as his main history, and then lead that into a study of the early Middle Ages. Since we are Orthodox Christians, this means we would study the ancient, original Christian church that started after the Nativity, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ at the beginning of the first century A.D. They say for younger children to start with the history that is closest to them (family, neighborhood, town, state, country and so on) but as Orthodox Christians, nothing is closer to our hearts than the Church. Since the history of our Church in closest to our hearts, we do this more, than say study the founding of America by Protestants (though we do study this too and enjoy learning about it.).
We started out reading a book called A Child's History of the Church by John Mason Neale, but we found it to be very difficult to read. Compared to books by Hillyer, or something in the Story of the World series, it was written in a very, choppy and difficult to read style that made it difficult to understand. Since we also read Saint's Lives daily by either St. Demetrius of Rostov or St Nikolai Velimirovic (in the Prologue) that are very well-written, and in story form, my son and I felt that it would be better to just get the idea directly from the Book of Acts in the Bible and in those lives and stop reading this book. However, I wasn't giving up that easily!
Next, I decided we could try the Famous Men of the Middle Ages curriculum by Memoria Press. However, I should have thought more carefully about our track record with using curriculum from that company, which has been pretty poor, because we stopped using it after about a week. I really don't want to insult people who love Memoria Press, but every time I use it, I feel like I am transported to a cold, dark room. I really love the traditional curriculum of Rod and Staff, which I find endearing and charming, but for some reason, Memoria Press doesn't work around here. Most of the times we have tried curriculum by them, it doesn't last too long in our house.
So there we were without a history curriculum - everything I was trying, was failing! So I decided to pull off the shelf The Age of Faith, which is written by an obscure Orthodox historian named Vladimir Moss. (You can access his published works online for free, but hard copies have to be purchased, which I did because they have many pages.) Vladimir Moss writes from a traditional Orthodox, anti-ecumenist, point of view. It is true that parts of the book are over our head (some even might consider it college level) but we are going slow and skipping parts that are too analytical, to get mostly the facts/action and the main points of the analysis. I cannot tell you how much we have learned from this book! (We have focused on the part that starts with St. Constantine and goes to St. Theodosius.) Especially helpful was learning, in more detail than I knew before, how the early Christians interacted with pagan society, and what they prayed for regarding it. As our society becomes more and more pagan in action, even if under a veneer of "modern Christianity" I found this incredibly helpful.
As I learn more and more about my heritage as an Orthodox Christian, it is clearer and clearer to me that the most important parts of history are hidden from most Americans. It is good that those with traditional values want to study things like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but what would be more important that the Christianization of the world that took place in the first millennia? Most American children spend their time reading biographies about Benjamin Franklin (a known freemason) but know little about St. Constantine, who ended Christian persecution by the Edict of Milan in 313. It is possible there are forces that want to keep God-fearing people from learning about their true heritage? (Speaking of which, soon on my list is An Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples by St. Venerable the Bede, which I have heard proves Orthodoxy is the true heritage of those of European descent). They know almost nothing about St. Theodosius (Emperor Theodosius) who banned the Olympic Games in 393 AD because of its ties to paganism, but know a whole lot about modern activists. Little is known about St. Nina, Equal to the Apostles who brought Christianity to Georgia in the early 300s, but much is known about historical figures who promote reason and science over faith.
Because of my interest in this, I did research on finding some more child-friendly books
containing information on the early church. It turns out in the past couple of years, a couple of traditional Roman Catholics have published relevant books that might help us out. One of them is called Of Pope, Elephants and Emperors: The First Thousand Years of Christian Culture . We are going to start the book next week, after we read one more section on Emperor Theodosius in the Vladimir Moss book. I can't wait! As a traditional Orthodox Christian, I am of course, not a papist. However, since Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians share the first 1000 years of history, this may work better than the Moss book given my son's young age. I will post a review here of that book as soon as we finish it! (Update: the book only sort-of worked out. I will add a review soon.)