The melting pot we have here in the United States should have taught us some critical lessons. One is that while we are all the same, we are also all different. We all learn in different ways.
My teachers–frequently coaches who cared more about sports than teaching, to be candid–always taught history the same way: chronologically from a book. They didn’t require the keeping of a timeline, nor did they point out that, say, John Adams and Ludwig van Beethoven died within about a year of one another. The influence of world history on American history was covered by my brilliant 11th grade English teacher, never by my social studies teachers. When I started playing the history games Timeline and Chronology during my children’s early homeschooling years, I started assembling in my mind the puzzles of history better than I ever had in my life, despite that I tried when I was teaching high school to teach American literature and American history alongside one another.
My social studies teachers typically assessed our knowledge through questions taken from the backs of chapters and written weekly tests. We rarely did any exciting comprehensive alternative assessments–i.e. projects. I graduated in the top ten of my class, but I did not retain much of the history knowledge I memorized for those weekly tests.
Additionally, my public school covered world history in 6th grade and again in 10th. We covered American history in 8th grade and again in 11th. We covered geography in 7th grade and again in 9th. We did economics and American government in 12th grade. Some of these classes were only a semester and not even year-long classes because my school was used for an experiment on the 4×4 block schedule. In my opinion, the jumping around, the huge gaps between classes, and the quick surveys of such huge amounts of content were/are haphazard ways to cover such an important subject area.
No wonder the electorate’s education seems to be in an alarming deficit!
My years of homeschooling have taught me that history may be better learned through a host of other methods rather than just reading (expensive) textbooks. For one thing, as a homeschooling parent, much history curriculum seems to be religion-based, and an increasing number of us are secular homeschoolers. For another, I don’t want to have to buy or request interlibrary loans for a lot of books for some of the curriculum plans for history I have found online. Finally, I have learned that books alone will not cement the material in my kids’ minds the way other media will. I’ve taken a host of classes on teaching exceptional students, and the one thing I can tell you is that you are best to combine various modes and methods of learning–audio, visual, tactile, etc.–if you want knowledge to “stick.”
But still, most of the homeschoolers I encounter locally look for a history curriculum. When my older child started first grade, we tried Story of the World, which I bought in its entirety and then used for just one year. My child hated it! To be honest, I didn’t care for it either. I found that it made an exciting subject area rather boring. But that same child loves historical fiction, so I have taught her history through the Magic Tree House and Dear America books. She also loves graphic novels, so she loves the historical graphic novels Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. As for my younger child, YouTube’s many contributors have helped me piece together history for him, sometimes with video visits to faraway historical landmarks we may never get to visit, but more often by conveying historical information even I did not know. Playing games and having my kids illustrate timelines have been helpful. One of my children is obsessed with Minecraft and took a Minecraft history class on Outschool for a while.
Another thing I’ve learned during this journey is that smaller chunks of daily or at least weekday learning consistently throughout every year is an improvement over covering one chapter of something per week and taking time off in the summer.
I’ve taken all of this knowledge and used it to create a system that works for us. I take one historical event from each day–even weekends–and cover it in detail. I also relate it to other events in history. I’ve included a calendar below. Eventually each date will link to my history lessons with my own children. You’ll notice these lessons intertwine (or “weave, ” as I called it long before Donald Trump hijacked the term) history, literature, and even music. You’ll also notice that I try to relate just about everything to what is going on in our modern world. After all, history may not repeat itself, but it will rhyme.
Please use my ideas as inspiration, as springboards for history lessons for your own children. And please post a comment if you have any suggestions!
Never stop learning,
Erin
August
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
| 31 |
July
