Stardust to Storytellers: Ancients

What Is Stardust to Storytellers: Ancients?

How do you get water to a city? Grow enough food to feed everyone? Build something that stays standing? Keep track of information and pass it on?

People have been working through these questions for thousands of years. Stardust to Storytellers: Ancients explores the people, cultures, and ideas behind those questions, along with the science that helps us understand their solutions.

We explore civilizations around the world, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Nubia, the Indus Valley, China, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Americas. We look at how people lived, what they made, what they knew, and how they shared that knowledge.

Science and history are connected. Moving water involves gravity. Building an arch involves forces and materials. Farming involves soil, water, and living things. Exploring these ideas together helps learners understand both the science and the people who used it.

How Do We Explore the Ancient World?

Each lesson begins with a question. We follow that question across different cultures and places, looking at how people approached similar problems in different ways.

That means we don't finish one civilization and leave it behind. We return to places and people throughout the course, making new connections as we go. Timeline work helps us keep track of when things happened and which societies existed at the same time.

We also ask how we know about the past. What can an object tell us about the person who made it? Whose words were written down, and whose weren't? What might be missing from the story?

Sometimes the evidence gives us a clear answer. Sometimes it leaves us with more questions. Learning to notice the difference is part of thinking like a historian.

Making It Work for Your Learner

There are 32 lessons, with readings, discussion questions, hands-on activities, timeline and workbook pages, and optional books and videos.

Please don't feel like you need to use every resource! Choose what helps your learner understand and stay interested. You might read together and talk, build something, draw an idea, or spend extra time exploring a question that comes up.

Workbook pages are optional. Learners can answer questions orally, dictate their thoughts, or show their understanding through an activity. You don't need a finished page for learning to have happened.

The discussions and rabbit holes matter! If learning about aqueducts turns into building water channels in the backyard, follow that curiosity. If your learner wants to spend more time figuring out how an arch stays up, there is room for that.

One lesson per week is a suggested pace. Take the time your learner needs, and make the course work for your family.

You do not need to complete Stardust to Storytellers: Prehistory before beginning Ancients.