Chapter 42 is the last in Story of the World Volume 3. We made it! The story of the forty-niners was familiar to the kids from other books we had read, so it was easy to delve into this chapter.
For our craft, we chose to paint pebbles with gold paint to make them look like gold flakes and gold nuggets. They played with them a bit afterward, but not too much. They consider them more of a collection, so they keep them proudly on their nightstands.
The map work and the coloring pages worked out fine. It was nice to be able to wrap this book up with a review of the world as it was in 1850 – a world of unrest.
It is very interesting to me that we needed an entire volume for the 1,000 years (approximately) of medieval times, which is volume 2 of Story of the World. But then, we needed an entire volume for only 250 years of world history, from 1600-1850.
It just goes to show how dark the Dark Ages really were and how much happened since the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. Sure, it also has to do with Susan Wise Bauer’s choice of laying things out in four volumes and breaking them up in this way.
Nevertheless, it astounds me that you can spend 42 chapters on 1,000 years of world history and then turn around and spend another 42 chapters on only 250 years. This being said, we are eager to start volume 4.
In fact, the day we finished volume 3 the children asked me to start volume 4. Why? Because they like it, I suppose. It is rather a different format and I can tell there have been some revisions made between the editions I had for volume 1, 2, and 3 vs. volume 4.