Ancient India Resources

Currently we are studying Ancient India for our homeschool social studies.  We use a wide variety of materials, spanning those for much younger children to those for adults or older students.  As a result, you may wish to evaluate any materials I list, or link to, before using them with your child(ren).  My son is 13, and does well with a mix of too-easy, right on target, and challenging materials.

Here are a number of great online resources for studying Ancient India:


BBC Primary History's Ancient India page for children

BBC History: Ancient India - for older students and adults

The British Museum's Ancient India page - Click on a category, then click on the large picture that should appear in the center of the screen in order to be taken to the actual page for the category.

Videos - some may be geo-tagged, meaning they can only be viewed in certain locations.  We've been able to watch all of these in the United States:

• What the Ancients Did for Us: The Indians - produced by the BBC
• Mysteries of Asia: Lost Temples of India - produced by The Discovery Channel (This one does touch on erotic elements in certain temples, but does not go into deep detail.)
• Warrior Empire: The Mughals - History Channel (5 parts)
• The Story of India - a 6 episode series from PBS; teacher resources and more HERE.
• The Buddha  (8 parts)
• The life of Buddha - BBC
• Neo K12 video clips - Some of these are multiple clips from a single video (so one video may be split up into 5 or 6 smaller clips).  Most are less than 10 minutes long.

 The offline resources that we are using include these books:

• The Times Complete History of the World (one of our main history texts)
• National Geographic Visual History of the World (one of our main history texts)
• Civilizations, Explorations, and Conquests (one of our main history texts)

 

• The Usborne Encyclopedia of World Religions
• The Ramayana - A Tale of Gods and Demons
• Siddhartha - by Herman Hesse

If you are interested in reading The Ramayana or Siddhartha, please check back in a few weeks for study guides and assignment ideas.