Having promised in my previous article to provide means and resources for sharing our American past with our elementary school-aged children, let’s jump right into that home-grown classroom. We’ll look at resources first, then ways to bring the people and events of our nation’s past alive for kids.
The Best of Times
Never have parents and teachers possessed such a wealth of treasure for teaching history as we do today. The countless stories and biographies written for the young, the songs and movies, the museums: all are widely available in libraries, bookstores and online. The gold is there; all we have to do is mine it.
Books: Countless biographies and colorful histories are wonderful vehicles for teaching about the past while also providing great opportunities for extracurricular reading. Rush Limbaugh’s “Rush Revere” series, for instance, with its stories about the Pilgrims, the American Revolution, and more was a big hit with some of my younger grandchildren. Poetry, like “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and historical fiction, like the “Childhood of Famous Americans” books, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, “Ben and Me,” and “Johnny Tremain” are only a few of the many fine books available to readers in elementary grades.
To get started, search online for “best historical fiction for elementary students.”
Music: Singing American history is a fun way to slide into the past. Songs like “John Henry,” “Cape Cod Girls,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Dixie,” and “Battle of New Orleans” offer a springboard into a discussion of the lyrics and their place in history. “The Star Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “God Bless America,” and other standards can easily become part of a child’s repertoire as well.
Search YouTube for “classic American history songs for kids” and you’re there. Thirty years ago, when my older children were elementary school age, our favorite was “Wee Sing America,” also available on YouTube.
Movies: The animated series “Liberty’s Kids,” having received two thumbs up from some of my grandkids, traces the history of the United States from the Boston Tea Party to the writing of the Constitution. “Animated Hero Classics” offers outstanding biographies of American heroes. The Civil War movie, “Shenandoah” is an example of a classic film that gives older elementary school students food for thought on slavery, war, and the rights of the individual.
Check out the Christian website Fields of Daisies, and you’ll find plenty of other films that will appeal to the K-6 set.
Museums: While visiting a museum or an historical site is best done in person, lots of these places feature tours plus documentaries and podcasts about historical events. When planning a vacation, you might include a visit to an historic site as a part of the trip. Quite often, too, we overlook exhibits and sites in our own communities. Explore online, and you’ll find an abundance of these treasures.
Old-Timers: When we visited Pennsylvania in my boyhood – New Castle was home to many relatives – I would often sit outdoors with my Uncle John, a man in his 60s who would regale me with tales of family history and his own adolescence. He read me 100-year-old letters written by my ancestors, talked about his boyhood memories from the early 20th century, and always encouraged my budding interest in the past.
Those elderly people – grandparents, friends, neighbors – are themselves walking, breathing museums. If they’re in their mid-70s, they’ve already lived through almost a third of our nation’s history. Sit them down with your children and have them tell their stories.
Approaches
Three ways to steer your children into history are through living books, unit studies, and my own preferred method as a boy, reading wherever my interests took me.
Educator Charlotte Mason’s advocacy for living books is popular among homeschoolers and should appeal to students no matter what schools they attend. These are “books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge.” Historical fiction, biographies, and autobiographies are the genres of living books that can open the eyes of a young person to the pleasures of learning about the past.
Unit studies can be both fun and educational by blending all sorts of resources. Suppose, for example, you want your children to learn more about World War II, both here at home and in the fighting overseas. Local libraries will sport any number of books on this topic, while students can watch movies like “The Longest Day” or find documentaries on YouTube. And those grandparents mentioned earlier, though most of them were born after the war, certainly talked to their parents who were 20-somethings during that time. They should have plenty of memories to share.
In my own elementary school years, my passion for history led me all over the place. The “Childhood of Famous Americans” books mentioned above inspired me to lead my friends in pretending that we were fighting the British during the Revolutionary War or exploring the Northern Rockies with Jim Bridger. My brother and I also spent hours looking through our family’s two-volume book, “The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.”
Whatever method you use to enliven interest in history, keep a timeline or a simple textbook handy for reference. This will give children context for their plunge into the past, learning, for instance, that the California Gold Rush preceded the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
These recommendations are only starting points. The resources are abundant and, in many cases, excellent. Give your children a nudge toward the past, and you may find them off on a lifelong love affair with the American story.
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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.
Image Credit: (Flickr-Joe Shlabotnik, cropped, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
