A Brief History
Today, learning history might be a passion for some people, yet, many of the kids and their moms and dads that are often homeschooling children today find this subject boring and difficult. Especially the parents teaching history at home find it tedious to keep on narrating the tales of wars, monarchies, civilizations, political transformations, and so much more. Is it possible to make the history class engaging for kids? The homeschooling parents would be glad if they find some innovative ways to teach history to their kids, offering it in a catchy and entertaining wrapper.
Digging Deeper
Here are some ways to make your history class truly interesting:
- Watch historical movies, web series, and documentaries together:
History should take your kids to a different era altogether. Engage with your kids in watching movies, documentaries, and web series showcasing the story of an ancient kingdom or possible future attack by aliens. These entertaining stories would improve their grasp of history through enhanced imagination.
Now, how can you make them remember the interesting movie or web series? The most practical way is to create short videos editing the text to reflect a current context.
You can get ready-to-adopt templates of the Game of Thrones memes online at reputed video making and editing platforms. These memes can be fun to let your kids recollect the popular historical show.
- Trips to historical places can help:
Most of your travel plans for leisure may take you to sunny beaches, lavish resorts, and sometimes to enjoy natural treasures like snow, desert, and forests. Taking your kids to a zoo, aquarium, or scientific exhibition relates to their studies of science. Educational field trips can be as much fun as others, with the added benefit of being a learning experience.
Yet, you can consciously plan trips to places that relate to history. Spend a weekend at a fort turned into a hotel, visit a historical museum, or take them to historical monuments like palaces, war fields, cultural exhibitions, and more.
The exposure to such historical places would generate and enhance your kids’ interest in learning history as they can see and feel the era next to their eyes.
- Encourage kids to participate in creative history projects:
Most of the schools organize exhibitions of social science subjects occasionally. Encouraging your kids to participate in such events would boost their creativity. Again, it is not only about directing them to plan and execute their project. It would be better to mentor their projects.
Helping them create static or working models, gather photographs and images of historical personalities, narrate a part of history through sketches, and other relevant activities would help your kids remember facts and figures effectively.
To add spice to their projects, you can add eye-catching love memes relevant to the narrative of the particular project. You can find a wide range of varieties in such material in terms of templates on popular online video making platforms.
- Let your kids relive historical experiences:
You can implement innovative and creative activities to take your kids to a particular historical zone. Let’s figure out some ‘out-of-the-box’ ways to achieve such phenomenal experiences:
- Accompany your kids to handcraft some properties that relate to some historical event, period, or transformation. You can create helmets that soldiers used to wear during World War II, the crown of a well-known king, swords in different shapes and sizes, and a replica of a fort, and much more.
- Organize a friendly fancy dress competition involving your kids’ school mates. Let the kids dress like great historical personalities, such as George Washington, John F. Kennedy, Alexander the Great, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and more.
- Spend some time to find delicious recipes connected to any particular historical period corresponding to the kids’ curriculum. This activity could be a great treat for their taste-buds and brain, making their lesson memorable.
- Direct a small play or drama involving a few of your kids’ schoolmates. This play should recreate a historical event. The costumes, dialogues, and the overall pitch of the act would add glamour to the process of learning history for sure.
- Take the aid of the internet:
Apart from online virtual classes, video lectures by prominent professors, and eBooks, the internet has a lot of other things that can make your history class truly interesting.
The Internet is a boon nowadays, a goldmine of educational opportunities. You can teach your students to learn history in a much better way by either showing them images or making a video to explain a series of events. You can circulate unknown facts about various special days we celebrate through ready-to-use templates available on InVideo. Your kids would get to know the reason behind different global and national occasions in an interesting and enticing manner.
Adding audio-visual learning aids would help you make your kids sit back and enjoy learning history. So, apart from referring to books and watching movies, you can find a wide range of learning material about various historical times and events online.
- Teach the art of learning life lessons from history:
Let your kids understand the intention to learn history. While teaching a lesson about any phase in history, emphasize the ‘moral of the story’. The facts and figures are significant. Yet, stuffing too much information without emotions leads to nowhere while learning or teaching history.
Inspire your kids to learn life lessons from the chapters in history. Let them analyze the causes of any conflicts in history. At the same time, teach them to avoid those mistakes in their lives. This practice would help you enrich their lives and keep a positive mindset.
It is crucial to focus on the personalities in history with influence, rather than the sequence of events. The struggle, patriotism, will power, leadership qualities, and other attributes of famous persons would inspire your kids to dream big and face the world positively during the journey of achievements.
The takeaway:
Teaching history to different age groups of kids is challenging. Younger kids would rely on your guidance, and elder ones would demand your attention and involvement in the process of learning. So, it would be helpful for you to implement the ideas discussed in this article to make your history class genuinely interesting. Maybe, your child would decide to major in this subject in the later stage of the career.
Question for students (and subscribers): Do you enjoy learning history? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Metro, Rosalie. Teaching U.S. History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom. Teachers College Press, 2017.
Metro, Rosalie. Teaching World History Thematically: Essential Questions and Document-Based Lessons to Connect Past and Present. Teachers College Press, 2020.
The featured image in this article, a U.S. Navy photograph by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Michael Achterling of Boatswain’s Mate 1st Class Christopher Haws, assigned to USS Constitution, blowing a Boatswain’s pipe during a naval history presentation to 8th grade students at Lanier Middle School, is a work of a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, it is in the public domain in the United States.
