My daughter recently dug out our Tudors and Stuarts book so she could check a few things in it and I realized that although we used it quite a lot in the earlier years of home educating (KS2 History) I never actually wrote a post about the book.

This book is part of a series of Usborne History books that we really loved. I like this series because it always selects a time period and focuses on the period, so it is a focused book on a set period. We borrowed quite a few of them from our local library but we did also buy a couple (the ones that I knew we were going to use over and over again) and this is one of the ones that we bought. And honestly all these years later it was well worth the money because it really does contain a lot of information and is perfect for History projects in the KS2 and even early KS3 years.

The book covers all the topics that you would expect (Henry and his wives, his split from the church etc) but it also goes into more detail in areas that other books sometime ignore or just gloss over, that is one of the reasons why I liked this little gem.

All in all it is 61 pages but it is 61 pages filled with interesting facts and written in an easy reading style. And it really does cover a lot – from the facts about the monarchy, to every day living and important events. Instead of trying to list out what it covers I have added a photo of the contents page.

Okay so format wise. The pages are well formatted (what we all come to expect from Usborne) – short paragraphs, lots of interesting pictures and diagrams and some fun boxes along the side of the pages to highlight certain facts. When my kids were younger I did read sections out of the book to them but we really got the most out of this book when my kids could sit and read it themselves. In fact we used it quite a lot when they had mini-projects to do for History (eg when my daughter was creating timelines and family trees or when we were doing a project on “what came after the Tudors”).

As a home educator I found this book really well written and very useful for our History learning. It is one of those books that I am thankful we chose to buy and add to our bookshelf.