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The Live Like a series by Claire Saunders and Ruth Hickson is a great addition to any Key Stage Two topic box.  Featuring Romans, Vikings and Egyptians (so far!) they include loads of information – as any great non-fiction title should – as well as well as plenty of beautiful spreads (some of which you can see below).  Non Fiction November is a celebration of Non-Fiction but we think you and your classes will love this series all year long!

If you are looking for non-fiction to suit your Key Stage 2 history curriculum or as reading for pleasure this series is sure to be enlightening and engaging.

Claire and Ruth kindly answered some questions for us about the series …

Claire:

The first book in the series was Live Like a Hunter Gatherer, which was written by Naomi Walmsley (a real-life hunter gatherer! For a TV documentary, she lived in the wild with her partner for a month and survived only using Stone Age tools). After the success of that book, Jonathan Bailey (Publisher at GMC), asked me if I’d be interested in writing another book for the series, Live Like a Roman. The Vikings and Ancient Egyptians books followed on from that, and I’m currently working on the next book in the series, Live Like a Tudor.

The books are such great fun to write, and I love the way they bring history to life through mixing factual information with craft activities, recipes and stories told by a fictional child character. I think this blend makes them uniquely immersive and interactive. Hopefully kids enjoy them too.

Claire:

The first step of putting the books together is to come up with an outline, which plans out what topic will be covered on each of the book’s spreads (a spread is two facing pages).

There are certain topics that appear in all of the books across the series – things like a timeline, food, health and medicine, what people wore, how society was structured, what a typical house looked like, what people did for fun, and so on.

But each book also covers some topics that are unique or especially important to that period of history – for example, in the Romans book we have a spread on life in the Roman army, in Vikings there are spreads on the afterlife and on the iconic Viking longship, and in Ancient Egyptians we have spreads on all the things you instantly think of when you hear the words ‘Ancient Egypt’ – hieroglyphics, pyramids and mummies!

Each book also includes at least three craft activities and three stories. When I’m planning a book, I try to choose a few crafts that kids can actually use and enjoy after they’ve finished making them (things like games, a Roman wax tablet or – my favourite – a usable Viking drinking horn!). When it comes to the stories, I think about places or experiences that kids might find interesting or that lend themselves to lots of action and excitement – for example, the Ancient Egyptians book follows our young Egyptian boy to school (something most kids can relate to), and the Romans book immerses readers in the sights and sounds of an action-packed day at the chariot races (the Roman equivalent of a big league football match today).

The final spread of each of the books asks kids “Could you live like a….?” through lots of questions that will hopefully spark fun conversations.

Claire:

I read as many books as I can before I put the outline together. There are lots of good videos and other resources available online too. For instance, for the Vikings book I listened to some brilliant lectures about the Viking afterlife on YouTube, by a professor of archaeology called Neil Price.

Each book in the Live Like a… series also has a consultant, who’s an academic expert in their field. They check that the text and illustrations are accurate and make other useful suggestions.

Claire:

Too many to list here! But here are a few favourites from the Egyptians book:

The Egyptian civilisation lasted for over 3,000 years – it’s such a mind-bogglingly long period of time when you really think about it. Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt, lived closer to our own age than she did to the time when the Great Pyramids were built.

Most people have heard of the Pyramids of Giza, but there are actually over 100 pyramids in Egypt (and many more in the neighbouring country of Sudan).

Archaeologists have found a 3,200-year-old Egyptian cheese that’s thought to be the oldest ever found!

All of the time periods I’ve written about, from the Romans to the Tudors, have one thing in common: women and men were not equal in society. But when writing the Ancient Egyptians book I was fascinated to discover that women had a surprising amount of rights. They were not completely equal to men (it was still a women’s job to look after the home, and most jobs were done by men), but they had the same legal rights as men, and could do business, earn wages, own and inherit property, and marry who they wanted. There were female brewers, estate managers, priestesses, doctors, musicians, and more.

Claire:

When I’m writing the text for a spread, I try to be aware of how it might work on the page – for example, whether we might want to show one big scene with labels (for example, a cutaway illustration of a house), or whether the spread will have more text with smaller accompanying pictures. I also provide artwork references (usually photographs) that the illustrator can use when they’re drawing their illustrations.

Once I’ve sent in the text and references, the editor and the designer work together to create a rough layout before commissioning the illustrations.

Claire:

I hope there will be! I’d love to write a book about the Tudors. Or the Mayans or Ancient Greeks! In fact, there are lots of incredible civilizations I’d love to find out more about.

Ruth:

I studied Printed textiles at Manchester Metropolitan University and had been working as a textile/surface pattern designer for many years, creating print and embroidery designs for women’s and children’s fashion.  Around 2016 I decided I needed a change of direction, away from fast fashion and a constant churn of ideas and more into developing my own style. So I started to explore illustration. I took some online classes which were extremely helpful and I began posting my illustrations on Instagram. After a lot of hard work I had a steady trickle of clients, mostly focussed on creating  illustrated maps, which I love doing! I always wanted to illustrate children’s books though and had reached out to  a few publishers but never had a response, then out of the blue in 2022 Jonathan from Button Books (part of GMC publications) contacted me to ask if I would like to illustrate a book about the Romans – a bit of a pinch yourself moment for me!

Ruth:

I start off by quickly sketching the design or elements in pencil or fine liner (I like a Pigma Micron 03 or 04 best!) then I carve and print some elements using easy carve lino, these are simple black and white prints but it allows me to create some texture. I then scan all these hand drawn and printed elements into the computer and that’s where I add the colour, using Adobe illustrator. Sometimes I will create the whole layout in a sketch but more often I piece together all the elements digitally, sort of like a collage. I also make loads of textures which I scan in to use in this ‘collage-y’ way for backgrounds etc. It’s very time consuming but also very flexible and means it’s fairly easy to make any changes that are needed.

Ruth:

I’m very lucky that the author Claire is extremely knowledgeable and she and my lovely editor at GMC will send me historically accurate reference material to work from, I will then also do lots of image searching online just to look at as many examples as I can for inspiration. GMC also has a historical advisor who looks at all the final illustrations to make sure they are accurate. I’ve always been really interested in history so I love finding out about all of this stuff anyway. I also drag my family to see real life examples! We live in Gloucestershire so we were able to visit Chedworth Roman Villa and the Corinium Museum in Cirencester for the Roman book. For Vikings we went up to Yorvik which I absolutely loved and would highly recommend. For the most recent book, which is about the Egyptians, we went to The British Museum – any excuse for an educational trip out!

Ruth:

My favourite spreads to illustrate are always the food ones!! I love drawing food, and I think it gives a real insight into the lives of ordinary people from the past to imagine what they eat – sometimes it’s just the same as what we eat now and sometimes really different, but we all eat food and i think it helps us to imagine them as people rather than just history. One of the things I really like about the Live Like A series is that there are the recipes and activity pages, I really enjoy creating those too. In the Viking book the most fascinating page for me was probably the one about Burials, these were really important rituals for the Vikings, people would be buried with all the things they would need in the afterlife, it’s quite touching and yet very practical and i thought the final illustration looked great.

Ruth:

The most recent book, is ‘Live Like an Egyptian’ and I absolutely LOVED working on this era!! So decorative and beautiful, full of fascinating stories, just a dream! I would also be really interested in the early 20th Century. It’s such an interesting era with lots of social change and big events. Plus I love the style of that time especially art deco motifs and decoration.

We love this series and are really excited to hear about Tudors!  Non-Fiction is always useful in classrooms but we also think these titles appeal to those students who prefer Non-Fiction as Reading for Pleasure.

You can read a little bit about each of the Live LIke a series by clicking the images below.

We’d like to thank Claire and Ruth for taking the time to answer our questions.