Customer Reviews

Life in Colonial America (Dover History Coloring Book)

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From the 1600s to 1776, the life of the colonial inhabitants of North America is depicted. There are a few scenes with Native Americans, but this is definitely a book about the colonizing inhabitants. Each picture is detailed, not your usual very simplified outline. Color pencils will be more appropriate than crayons. Each picture also includes a lengthy paragraph caption explaining the picture. The sequence is not exactly in order, but close. This is not Kindergarten material. The ages 9-12 in the description is probably accurate.

Pictures:
A Passage to the New World, Early 1600s
Arrival in the New World, early 1600s
Encountering the Native Americansm early 1600s
Spanish settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, early 1600s
The Lost Colony (1587)
Building house at Massachusettes Bay Colony, 1627
Clearing land and building houses in Maryland colony
New Sweden,1638
A Dutch patroon and his wife, ca 1640
Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1640
A colonial bedroom
A colonial kitchen
A colonial shipyard, 1650s
Dutch New Amsterdam, 1653
A post windmill
Sir William Berkeley, royal governer of Virginia and Lady Berkeley, 1675
An ox team, ca 1680
A hunting party, ca 1685
An early Pennsylvania famr home, 1680s
Indian slaves in Charles Town, South Carolina
On a deck of a slave ship
The Deefield Massacre of 1704
Colonial Dressmaking
Slaves in a southern plantation kitchen
A horse race
French voyageurs in the northwest forest, 1730s
A sailors' tavern in Boston, 1735
Bringing tobacco to market
Reading the newspaper, 1740
George Washington as a young surveyor
Urban crime in Philadelphia, 1755
The funeral of General Braddock, 1755
A Ductch wagon, 1750s
Quebet, 1759
A frontier fort, 1760s
A post chaise, mid-eighteenth century
A Native American fort in Appalacian wilderness
A river ferry, ca 1770
A stage wagon, ca. 1770
A Spanish priest in California, 1771
Lamplighter, ca 1775
Militia muster, 1775
Pulling down a statue of King George III, 1776
The signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776

As a classical homeschooler using History in chronological order as the engine that drives our inter-related unit studies (History, Geography, Literature, Science, English, and some Economics) I find these coloring books useful during read-aloud times. While we are reading aloud either first source materials (autobiographies, personal correspondence by a historical figure, writings of a historical figure, historical documents, etc.) or Literature written during the time we are studying, these coloring books give my kids something to do with their hands and focuses them on what people looked like and lived like during that part of History.

We later incorporate these colored pictures in our lapbooks (sort of like a scrapbook portfolio) of all their assignments (reports, book reports, time lines, charts, maps, handwritten copies of historical documents, art from the period.) We have used Dover coloring book pictures in our lap books from The Renaissance/Reformation, Age of Exploration, Colonial Era, and are now using them for our American Revolutionary War studies. If I had known about them earlier, they would have been used from the beginning when we started with The Ancients.

As a rule, Dover Publications comes out with the most delightfully entertaining and educational coloring books. Life in Colonial America is another one that will teach your history student about the real everyday life of colonists.

Each page gives detail about the picture you are working on, completing the information you can absorb while bringing each scene to life. And, with 44 pictures to color, that's a lot of information. Life in Colonial America is historically accurate and fun!

I knew Dover sold these kind of coloring books so I went to Amazon to see if I could find one at a reasonable price. Voila! Went to williamsburg and took this along to help my homeschooled grandchildren with some fun history work!