My memories of elementary school history are mostly reading the chapter and answering the questions at the end of it. Does that sound familiar? It was so boring! History was my least favorite subject. And then one year of high school I had a history teacher who would stand up in front of the class and tell us stories. I loved his class!
When I started teaching history in homeschool I wanted to be the teacher who excitedly told stories, not the read-the-chapter-and-answer-the-questions teacher. After 17 years of teaching homeschool, I’ve gotten pretty good at not only telling the stories, but adding more than just listening time to help history come to life for my kids.
I have to tell you that my favorite history books at this point are “The Story of the World” books by Susan Wise Bouer. (You can find them on Amazon.) These books are written in a way that your older students could read and understand them, and even enjoy the stories of history. When I’m teaching with them I read a couple chapters myself and then talk to my kids about them for the base of our history lessons. Then we use other things like these tips I’m going to share to make it even better.
5 Ideas for Teaching History
Tip #1: Make a Timeline
Drawing a simple timeline, or even better, having your kids draw a simple timeline, gives more opportunites to learn than just listening does. One thing I learned again and again in my education classes was that the more senses we can use to learn, the more likely it is to stick. When they can see it, and write it out with their hand, that gives them two ways to learn besides listening.
A timeline can cover one story, or it can summarize several stories they’ve been learning about. However you use it, it’s a good tool for teaching history.
Tip #2: Look at a Map
I’ve often gotten out a blow up world ball during homeschool to help the kids visual where something happened. I also have a big world map on the wall. This year I had my kids each get their own small world map so they could circle the countries we talk about. It’s also great to find maps on the internet of specific places to add a setting to the stories of history. My kids love it when we look at Google Earth together.
Tip #3: Find Pictures
There’s nothing like a picture to help us visual something we aren’t familiar with. If I describe to you what a middle aged English knight looked like, you might get the right image in your head, or you might not. If I show you a picture, the words become clear and you are way more likely to remember. With access to the internet and thousands of images, we have no excuse to not enhance our kids history lessons with a picture once in a while.
Tip #4: Do an Activity
This one is my favorite. It’s fun to plan an activity to go along with our homeschool history lessons, and it’s fun to watch them enjoy it. We’ve dried apples to go along with a lesson that mentioned ancient food preserving. We’ve weaved paper to go along with lessons that mentioned basket making. We’ve made up stories after learning about the way stories used to be passed down by spoken words.
I can’t even begin to tell you all the activities we’ve done to enhance our history lessons and make them fun over the years. I wrote about some of those activities in my posts Culture of Kindness, and Culture of Kindness Part 2. We had been learning about world cultures and took time to celebrate foreign holidays to help us get a feel for what we’d learned.
Pictured here is a spoon race and a lamington eating contest we played to celebrate Australia’s history.
Tip #5: Get their Feedback
One of the best ways we can remember what we’ve learned is by talking about it. Ask a discussion question and let them give you their thoughts on the matter. One of my favorite ways to get my kids feedback is to ask them what they learned or what stood out to them in our homeschool history lesson that day. I give each of them a chance to answer, and I love to hear their insights.
I have loved learning learning about history as I’ve studied it with my kids! it’s been the opposite of boring! I hope that these tips can make history more fun for you and your kids.
Thanks for reading my post!
