Who Really Discovered America: Unraveling the Mystery & Solving the Puzzle (Kaleidoscope Kids)

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Summary: If not Columbus, then who? The answer(s) might surprise you
Review: Your assumption might be that a book entitled "Who Really Discovered America?" would be one that makes the case for the discovering of the Americas by the Vikings rather than Christopher Columbus, but those are only a pair of the possibilities here. The complete title of Avery Hart's Kaleidoscope Kids Book is "Who Really Discovered America? Unraveling the Mystery & Solving the Puzzle" and if there is one thing you need to know before diving into this book it would be that you are not going to get the answer as the end. That is because the point here is to present young readers, ages 7-14, with all of the opinions and theories that make up the evidence for this particular historical puzzle. The goal is not to answer the question as to who really discovered America but rather to instruct readers on the mysterious ways in which history reveals itself to inquiring minds.

Recognizing that truth tacking is not easy, Hart provides his young readers with a five-point "Star Guide" to allow them to weigh the merits of the ideas they come across in this book. The idea is that each point on the star (or each finger on your hand) represents a particular point for which you can award 0 to 5 points for each theory: (1) Start with what you know: how does the new theory support the facts as you know them? (2) Throw out old opinions: Is your mind really open or do you secretly want a particular idea to be true (or untrue)? (3) Review the theory evidence: what specific evidence supports the theory and how reliable is it? (4) Use intuition: what does you gut say about the theory? (5) Put it all together: overall, does the idea make sense and fit with the other puzzle pieces? If you believe a theory is absolutely true it would score 25 points.

Throughout the book the "Truth Trackers" are presented with not two but ten different theories to evaluate and see which one comes closest to the truth and earns the highest score: (1) The Land-Bridge Theory that humans first crossed a strip of land from Russia to Alaska; (2) The Multiple-Migration Theory that the first people to discover the Western Hemisphere came by boats, in small groups, over thousands of years; (3) The Woden-Lithi Theory that an ancient Scandinavian king traveled from Norway, across the Atlantic, and up the St. Lawrence River to Toronto in about 1750 B.C.; (4) The Lakota Theory that all human life began in the Black Hills of the Dakotas; (5) The Alien Theory that gifted aliens came to earth to marry the first apelike prehumans and create the intelligent human beings of today; (6) Van Sertima's African Theory that Africans arrived in America almost 2,000 years before Columbus; (7) Professor Xu's Asian Theory that refugees from the Chinese Shang dynasty influenced the development of the Olmec civilization; (8) The Other Way-Around Theory that ancient people from the Americas took to the oceans and sailed on currents to Africa, Asia, or Europe; (9) The Vikings "Discovered" America; and (10) Columbus "Discovered" America.

For most of these theories Hart lays about the specific evidence for and against it to assist young readers to be "a history-in-the-making detective." Students are required to separate fact from fiction, search for artifacts, explore language links, interpret petroglyphs, trace ocean currents, and debate the different theories. Along the way they will learn a little bit about different peoples, from Kennewick Man and Spirit Caveman to the Red Paint People, Olmec, and Mound Builders. There are also creative activities such as building a Viking ship and a "Kon Tiki"-style reed boat, growing a sod house, writing a Viking saga, estimating a trees age, making a giant-sized drawing, baking Taino bread, giving Columbus a grade in geography, taking a survey, and inventing a new holiday to celebrate the Americas.

There is an entire grade school unit of at least two-weeks in length packaged in the 96-pages of "Who Really Discovered America?" Students should be excited by the prospect of being a detective, gathering the evidence, thinking about and questioning that evidence, and engaging in creative projects. Just the idea that the "right" answer (or the "truth," if you will) is debatable is an important lesson. Students will have the "beginning of a deeper understanding of what discovery and America are really all about," but will also realize that new information about the discovery of America is always being uncovered and that the question remains open in the future. In fact, finding out about that new information could be part of the project.