CC Cycle 1 Book List: 100 Amazing Picture Books for 2024

We are now over halfway through the summer and starting to look forward to our next school year! Well, I am starting to look forward to it – though the kids may not feel the same quite yet. They are thoroughly enjoying their exorbitant hours of free time which have mostly been filled with bike rides, make-believe worlds, sprinkler-jumping, a healthy amount of bickering, and an (un)healthy amount of popsicles. It’s not a bad life.

One thing I look forward to is that it will be our first time repeating a Classical Conversations cycle (our first year we joined was Cycle 1, also), and it is my first time tutoring Cycle 1! I have been planning for several months to sit down and make a CC Cycle 1 book list in preparation for the upcoming year, and I finally made the time to do so. Whether or not you are a part of this particular homeschool group, I think you will enjoy the books below! And do not be fooled into thinking that picture books are just for preschoolers – all of our children, up to the 11 year old, will happily sit and thoroughly enjoy a great picture book – and sometimes I enjoy it even more than any of them. Pictures books are for everyone! And don’t forget that there are many fantastic reasons to read aloud to your children, so this is well worth your time.

Full disclosure: Because the school year has not yet begun, I have not yet read or personally flipped through *every single* book on this list. We hope to work through many of them throughout the course of this year, but this will take some time – and I wanted to get this book list out before the year begins, to help any of you who might also be a part of Classical Conversations! However, though I have not read them all yet, they have all been recommended by various sources that I trust, so I expect them to be excellent – and if we end up not liking any of them, I will remove them from the list. I hope these books will be sources of joy and pleasure to you and your children!

As always, I would like to remind you that we will not read every single book on this list this year, and neither should you. Rather than rushing through the books at top speed in order to “finish” them all, it would be far better to pick out perhaps three or four great books from this list, read them multiple times, savor them, enjoy them, and befriend them! I am telling this to myself because I have a tendency to want to rush through our books in order to read more – but the point is the reading, not the finishing.

Without further ado, here it is, the CC Cycle 1 book list, arranged by subject! Books with an asterisk are longer, chapter-type books that you wouldn’t be able to read in one sitting.

CC Cycle 1 Book List

History/Timeline (mostly related to Ancient History)

1. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths by Ingri and Edgar d’Aulaire*
2. Gilgamesh the King by Ludmila Zeman
3. The Revenge of Ishtar by Ludmila Zeman
4. The Last Quest of Gilgamesh by Ludmila Zeman
5. The True Story of Noah’s Ark by Tom Dooley
6. Pharaoh’s Boat by David Weitzman
7. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Lynn Curlee
8. The Gods and Goddesses of Olympus by Aliki
9. The Great Pyramid by Elizabeth Mann
10. Wonders of the World Coloring Book by Dover
11. We’re Sailing Down the Nile by Laurie Krebs
12. The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Katherine Lasky
13. The Library of Alexandria by Kelly Trumble
14. Pyramid by David Macaulay
15. City by David Macaulay
16. Mosque by David Macaulay
17. Tales of Ancient Eygpt by Roger Green
18. Augustus Caesar’s World by Genevieve Foster*
19. The Children’s Homer by Padraic Colum*
20. Encyclopedia of the Ancient World (Usborne) by Jane Bingham*
21. Of Numbers and Stars: The Story of Hypatia by D. Anne Love
22. Mummies Made in Egypt by Aliki
23. Africa is Not a Country by Margy Knight
24. The Library of Alexandria by Kelly Trumble
25. The Ancient Maya by Jackie Maloy
26. The Aztec Empire by Sunita Apte
27. Aztec, Inca, & Maya by DK
28. Star Mounds by Ross Hamilton
29. The Very First Americans by Cara Ashrose
30. Mound Builders & Cliff Dwellers by Dale Brown
31. Indian Nations of North America by National Geographic*
32. The Kids Book of Canadian Exploration by Ann-Maureen Owens
33. The Heroic Symphony by Anna Celenza
34. The Story of Napoleon by H. E. Marshall*
35. The Usborne Book of Living Long Ago by Felicity Brooks*

Science (topics include animals, plants, rocks, ocean, & weather)

1. Pagoo by Holling Clancy Holling*
2. Animalium by Jenny Broom
3. Nesting by Henry Cole
4. Whose Egg? by Guy Troughton
5. An Egg is Quiet by Dianna Aston
6. The Big Book of Birds by Yuval Zommer
7. From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons
8. A Seed is Sleepy by Dianna Aston
9. Up in the Garden and Down in the Dirt by Kate Messner
10. The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss
11. Sunflower House by Eve Bunting
12. What Do Roots Do? by Kathleen Kudlinski
13. Botanicum by Kathy Willis
14. Drawn From Nature by Helen Ahpornsiri
15. Outside Your Window by Nicola Davies
16. Sounds of Nature: World of Forests by Robert Frank Hunter
17. Animals Born Alive and Well by Ruth Heller
18. An Anthology of Intriguing Animals by DK
19. My Awesome Summer by P. Mantis by Paul Meisel
20. My Happy Year by E. Bluebird by Paul Meisel
21. My Stinky Summer by S. Bug by Paul Meisel
22. Ultimate Bugopedia by National Geographic
23. How to Dig a Hole to The Other Side of the World by Faith McNulty
24. The Magic School Bus Inside the Earth by Joanna Cole
25. Rocks: Hard, Soft, Smooth and Rough by Natalie Rosinsky
26. Rocks in His Head by Carol Hurst
27. Everything Rocks and Minerals by National Geographic
28. A Rock is Lively by Dianna Aston
29. Pompeii… Buried Alive! by Edith Kunhardt
30. The Magic School Bus Blows Its Top by Joanna Cole
31. Volcano by Patricia Lauber
32. An Anthology of Our Extraordinary Earth by Cally Oldershaw
33. Down, Down, Down by Steve Jenkins
34. Behold the Octopus! by Suzanne Slade
35. The Tide Pool Waits by Candace Fleming
36. Over and Under the Pond by Kate Messner
37. Over and Under the Waves by Kate Messner
38. Weather Words and What They Mean by Gail Gibbons
39. On The Same Day in March by Marilyn Singer
40. Storms and Hurricanes by Kathy Gemmell
41. Sometimes Rain by Meg Fleming

Fine Arts (Composers, Orchestra, Great Artists)

1. How to Build An Orchestra by Mary Auld
2. The Story of the Orchestra by Robert Levine
3. The Story Orchestra: The Magic Flute by Katy Flint
4. Becoming Bach by Tom Leonard
5. Michelangelo by Diane Stanley
6. Michael the Angel by Laura Fischetto
7. Stone Giant by Jane Sutcliffe
8. Hallelujah Handel by Douglas Cowling
9. The Carnival of the Animals by Jack Prelutsky
10. Ada’s Violin by Susan Hood
11. Mozart: the Wonder Child by Diane Stanley
12. Mozart: the Boy Who Changed the World With His Music by National Geographic
13. Mozart Finds a Melody by Stephen Costanza

Math

1. Can You Count in Greek? Exploring Ancient Number Systems by Judy Leimbach
2. Sir Cumference and All the King’s Tens by Cindy Neuschwander (plus other books in that series)
3. Blockhead: the Life of Fibbonaci by Joseph d’Agnese
4. The History of Counting by Denise Schmandt-Besserat
5. Pythagoras and the Ratios by Julie Ellis
6. What’s Your Angle, Pythagoras? by Julie Ellis
7. Zero is the Leaves on a Tree by Betsy Franco
8. Math Curse by Jon Scieszka
9. What’s the Point of Math? by DK Publishing
10. Billions of Bricks by Kurt Cyrus
11. Multiplying Menace by Pam Calvert

WOW that’s a lot of books. One hundred, to be precise! Let me remind you again – we will not read every single one of these! Think of it as a pleasantly varied menu – you can pick and choose the pieces that will nourish you and your children, but if you tried to experience every single item on the menu you’d end up with a stomach ache. My personal goal is to read just one or two books each week that coincide with the CC topics of the week.

One final important clarification: I am not buying all of these books, and if I do buy some, they won’t all be brand new. My first stop is always the library, to see how many of these I can find in our local system (generally most of them are there!). After that, if there’s a book I really want to read that our library doesn’t carry, I will check Thrift Books or Abe Books (or you could call your favorite local used bookstore); if I can’t find it there either, then I might purchase it from Amazon. I only link this CC Cycle 1 book list to Amazon because it is easy, but I encourage you to find them used or to support your local libraries and independent bookstores.

Happy reading!