He will take a long sea voyage with the inventor of the sextant in Jean Lee Latham's Carry Me On, Mr. Bowditch. Good stories of the American frontier are abundant. The compelling story of a child alone in the wilderness in Milly Howard's Captive Treasure provides insight into that period of history from the Indians' point of view, while books such as the well-known Laura Ingalls Wilder books show the settler's life on the frontier. Dawn Watkins's Zoli series and Donna Hess's A Father's Promise will help your child get a sense of history out of the World War II names and dates and places of your Heritage Studies books. The list of historical fiction books is long and varied.
Fanciful tales offer another part of the reading menu.
A universal truth lies under the metaphor of a good fantasy story. When the story is well written, the truth teaches itself. The friendship and character interaction of the Winnie the Pooh stories will spill out into your daily conversation when you and your children have made friends with them reading the Milne books a few times. White's Charlotte's Web teaches more about the meaning of friendship than an explicit realistic story ever could. In Jeri Massi's Bracken Trilogy, good always triumphs over evil and leaves the reader with a sense of how good right is.