It’s here! Connor shares details about our exciting new American history book and how you can get an awesome bundle of bonuses to learn ideas from our country’s past.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

iTunesStitcherSpotifyTuneInGoogle Podcasts

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Connor: Hey everyone, Connor here. I gave Brittany the day off. So you’ve got just me today to talk about an exciting new book that we just released. You’ve probably heard about it already. If not, maybe you’ve been living under a rock. I don’t know what, but it’s called America’s History, A Tuttle Twins Series of Stories. We’ve been working on this for like two and a half years. It is so amazing how it turned out. We are so excited by it. It is a book about American history. Now, for the kids listening out there, I wanna share something with you. I’m gonna be vulnerable for a moment. I hated history in school. I mean, it’s not that I just disliked it. It’s not that I was just okay at it. I really kind of hated it. Like I, didn’t feel like it was relevant to my life. I didn’t enjoy memorizing all these names and dates and stuff that I felt like didn’t matter to me. I didn’t understand why I was being forced to learn all these things that I didn’t really care about. And so it was not a subject I enjoyed. So when we’ve been working on this book, I’ve been thinking about young Connor and how could he have been taught history in a way that would’ve been fun, but also relevant for his life in a way that he would’ve seen. Wow, okay. Yeah. Even though like that was way long ago, I see why it matters and it helps me understand the world today. Because what I’ve found from doing the Tuttle twins for eight years now with our team is that kids like learning how the world works. They like learning big ideas. They like understanding this world we’re a part of. And so as we’ve been working on this history book, I’ve been thinking, how do we do history in a way that helps kids learn about their world today, not just the world 250 years ago, not just, you know, early America, colonial, whatever. But how do we learn about our world today through the lens of history? Now, there’s a quote you’ve all probably heard of before. It says those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. And we’ve all heard this quote before, most of us, maybe not the young kids, right? If you don’t learn from the past, you’re gonna repeat it. And really what the quote is trying to say is, if you don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, then you’ll repeat those mistakes. But there’s a big problem. And that problem is that the history books that are used in schools all across the country and the history books that a lot of homeschoolers use, they don’t teach kids to learn from the past. They just teach kids to learn about the past. Do you understand the difference? Right? These books aren’t saying, here’s these ideas and these values, and here’s how they work today. And so we can learn from the past and apply them to our lives today and become, you know, smarter, better people and a more peaceful, prosperous society. They don’t do anything about that. They say on this date, this happened and this guy said this thing to this other guy, and then they wrote a letter and then this happened. And then there was a battle. These people shot these people and then they traveled Here. It’s like reading a journal, you know? And while interesting and important in many respects, it doesn’t really help us understand ourselves today. It doesn’t hold kids’ hands and say, Hey, let me show you how that matters to your life. How this thing that happened 275 years ago or whatever, how it matters in 2022. So what if there was a history book that did that? What if there was a history book that used storytelling to make history fun, to read and learn about? What if there was a history book that helped us understand our world today by sharing the ideas of the past and how they’re connected to our modern life? Well, that is the book that we have made. Now, what’s exciting for us, I haven’t talked too much about this yet, but we soon will, is that this is gonna be the first in likely a four-volume series. So we hope to do four books in total by the time we’re done. This one starts clear back in the 12 hundreds and takes us all the way through 1776. And so volume two, which we’ll hopefully put out next year, is gonna cover from 1776 moving forward. And then we’ll keep on going. But this book talks about, you know, before the Declaration of Independence, what was happening, all the events that led up to it. So it’s very exciting and we’ve been working on it a long time. The book is about 240 pages long. It’s fully illustrated, and I would say it’s for kids, roughly seven to maybe 13 years of age, somewhere around there. But of course, like all of our books, we’ve got younger kids who are gonna love it. We’ve got older kids who are gonna love it. How do I know this? Well, it’s that way with frankly all of our books, number one. But number two, we’ve had a lot of kids test-read this. We’ve had some families that have been reading this and giving us feedback. And so we’ve seen it specifically with this book that, you know, 16-year-olds are reading along cuz like young Connor, those 16-year-olds have had to sit through boring history classes and never understood why they had to learn the names of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, right? Or whatever. And so they’ve never really learned history the right way. And so along comes this book and they’re intrigued and they’re engaged and they wanna learn more. Cause it’s a fun history or it’s a fun story to learn from. So for the parents listening out there, you can go to Tuttletwins.com/history and that’s where you’ll find our launch bundle. That’s where you’re gonna get access to some of these freebies. We’ve got curriculum, we’ve got audiobooks, we’ve got videos, and all of that we’re lumping together. Now, I will say a word of warning for the parents listening out there. By the time this episode airs, that deal is probably soon going to expire. So we’re hopefully gonna have this episode launch around the 4th of July, I would say. So, avail yourselves of this bundle soon, because it’s just for that, it was for our pre-order and then for our launch. And so you’re gonna wanna go to Tuttletwins.com/history and get the bundle because, pretty soon we’re gonna disconnect that bundle. You’re gonna have to buy those other items individually if you want the curriculum and the audiobooks and so forth and so then you would just, you know, have to pay more. So Tuttletwins.com/history is where you can go. Now, for the kids listening, I wanna share why this matters. Why does it matter that we learn our history? Well, there’s so many kids out there today who grow up to love socialism. They grow up to love big government. They grow up to be entitled, they grow up to not understand our rights. I mean, I’ve shared this on a past episode, but think of the example where you have a neighbor who lives next to you and you live on a property that is just really old and your great-great-grandfather lived there, but no one quite remembers where the property boundary is between you and your neighbor. You kind of think, eh, it’s over there, but no one really knows. So that neighbor, he’s a filthy person just always dumping trash on the lawn and it’s starting to spill over onto your property, or at least what you think is your property. But you don’t actually know cuz you don’t know where the boundary actually is. And so the neighbor keeps taking advantage and keeps pushing more and more. And pretty soon he’s encroaching, he’s moving onto your property right in front of your doorstep and everything. And it’s hard because you don’t know where the actual boundary is to push back and to defend your property. That’s what it’s like with our rights. If we don’t understand our rights, we can’t defend them. And so then the government pushes and pushes and pushes some more. And pretty soon we’re losing our rights pretty soon, right? We are defenseless. Pretty soon the government has gained so much ground in violating our rights because we never knew where to defend them. Cuz we didn’t understand. That is the problem with not understanding our history. If we don’t understand how these things have happened in the past, we can’t better appreciate how they’re happening today. If we learn from the past, the mistakes of the past, then we can help, prevent them from repeating. But unfortunately today, kids are bored with history and they’re not learning the ideas of the past. They’re just learning all the names and dates and battles and who did what and when. And so they don’t care. They’re apathetic. It’s, that’s not a fun way to learn history. So, they tune out and they have no idea why it’s relevant to their lives. In fact, they think it is not relevant to their lives just as young Connor thought. And so they grow up believing whatever they want and oh, hey, this cool politician sounds great, and oh, they’re gonna give free stuff. And oh, how awesome is that? But they don’t understand history. They don’t know how that same thing has been tried so many times over the years. And it’s how people surrender their freedoms under this seductive lure of socialism. And so they support these freebies. They want freebies. This politician sounds so nice. Oh, they’re just doing a temporary order. It’s just two weeks to flatten the curve, no big deal. And pretty soon our rights start slipping away because we don’t understand our history. So for you kids, we have tried so hard to make this fun. It is a fun it interesting story. If you like our Tuttle Twins books, you will love this one. It’s just like 11 Tuttle Twins books in one in terms of the length, cuz there’s 11 chapters. And each of the chapters is roughly the length of one of our children’s books. So it’s like 11 Tuttle Twins books all in one. This big story. My favorite, neighbor Fred is involved and the twins learn from Fred all kinds of interesting stuff about history and how it matters to their world today. And we’ve got the curriculum and there’s activities and projects and recipes to make fun stuff with your family and all kinds of stuff to better learn the lessons from the book and think about history. So I hope you guys take advantage. Grab the launch bundle while we have everything wrapped together for you to get this awesome value. Tuttle twins.com/history for the parents or kids. If you’re listening alone, you can go tell your parents to check out the Tuttle Twins website and make sure your family has a set. This is something whether the 4th of July or for homeschool curriculum or if your kids are in public school, you wanna make sure that they actually learn history in a nonboring and relevant way. And so you can sit down together as a family after dinner or on weekends and read a chapter together and have some amazing discussions about how these things from the past apply today. Because they do, but they’ve never been taught to us as kids in a way that makes that seem interesting. So we tune it out and we don’t care. And sure, maybe we memorize a few things and we take a test and then we move on. Or maybe we care a little bit we don’t really understand. This book will help you understand the ideas. This book will help you understand why it matters to our lives today and how we can learn from the mistakes of the past and prevent them today. So the book is called America’s History. It’s Volume One in a series of Tuttle Twins Stories. Hope you guys check it out. Grab one for your family. Tuttletwins.com/history is where it’s at. Grab a copy of the book, get reading together. This is how we save our country. You guys. We gotta learn from history. We gotta stop people from committing the same mistakes of the past. We gotta better understand how past people dealt with it so that we can learn and improve. So check out the book, Tuttletwins.com/history. Hope you guys enjoy. We’ll talk to you next time.