Book: Pompeii: Lost and Found by Mary Pope Osborne

Zach and I just finished up reading Pompeii: Lost and Found by Mary Pope Osborne. I found it just browsing the history section in the library for him. What a treasure this little book turned out to be. We are finishing up Rome in our Sonlight core 1 and I wanted to cover Pompeii a little more. He had read in his readers a children's paperback about Pompeii, but that was months back. I needed to refresh his memory a bit. This Osborne book is a nonfiction storybook, large size, with nicely done illustrations on each page, and not an overwhelming amount of text, making it perfect as a quick review or adjunct to another more meaty history book covering the topic. The illustrations are "fresco style," meaning they appear in the style of what fresco paintings would look like at the time, on the walls of the villas. I thought that was a particularly nice touch. The book opens and closes with the archeological find, thus framing the story for the kids into the past, and reiterating it as a true historical account rather than just a story. It also goes beyond the bare basics of the destruction of Pompeii, discussing also the culture and times of Rome briefly, one topic per two-page spread in the book. It does not gloss over the fact that the entire town died, but it did it in a considerate way, I think. That can be a rough topic for some particularly sensitive kids that age. This is a great book on Pompeii, appropriate for lower elementary students. It went very nicely with our last weeks of Sonlight core 1.