Teach Us History in Homeschool
When teaching your children history, a common strategy is to choose a textbook that presents the lessons, facts and details in a straightforward manner. While this approach to history may be effective for some students, it can also be a little dry and boring to go through. To help keep your kids engaged, try incorporating more narrative or story-based approaches to your study of history.
Charlotte Mason referred to these books as “living books,” and they are a great way to bring history to life for your students. You can also choose to focus on specific topics or periods of history instead of following a chronology. This can be a more engaging way to learn because it allows your students to gain a deeper understanding of certain themes, issues and movements in history.
The best history homeschool curriculum will combine multiple methods of learning, so that your kids can get the most out of their study of history. This is especially important with younger children who may have a difficult time concentrating during lengthy lectures. Use a combination of hands-on activities, books and films to help keep your child’s interest and comprehension. You can also find a variety of online resources to teach history including websites that offer video lectures, documentaries and historical games.
Another way to teach your children history is to talk about where you live and what happened in the past before your family moved there. This can be done through local landmarks, kid-friendly museums and even traffic signs or building signs that highlight historical events. You can also provide your kids with globes or maps to give them a physical sense of the location of historic events in relation to the rest of the world.
How to Teach Us History in Homeschool
You can use a variety of books to teach history, including fictional stories, biography and nonfiction. However, one of the best ways to teach your kids history is to take them on a field trip. Field trips allow your children to see the environment they are learning about and can help drive their interest in studying it.
You can use movies to help teach history, but it’s important to remember that they often take a lot of literary license with the real-life events that they are portraying. You can still let your kids watch historical films, though, and then discuss with them how the film differs from reality.
Using a real-life event to introduce a new time period or topic will help your kids relate to what they are learning. This allows them to understand what life was like for the people and presidents they are studying and makes it more likely that they will be able to genuinely wrestle with the major complexities of the past.
One way to approach this is by using a timeline. Creating a timeline of the historical figures your children are studying helps them remember their names and important dates. Another great way is through a biography study. Reading biographies of famous people from the same time period your child is studying will really give them a feel for what it was like to live during that time.