History and All That Jazz

Reminder that the monthly drawing for a $25 gift card is still going on for June and will include responses to the May blog as well. All you have to do to get your name in the drawing is post a response to any of the May or June blogs. You don't have to be a member of NCCS to respond. Gift cards are from your choice of: Publix, Walmart, Olive Garden-Red Lobster, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.

To finish off our series on various subject areas, I wanted to talk about social studies. Some people like to call it social sciences, but there is a real difference. Let's look at that difference first.

Social studies is study - discovering facts about something - and it usually occurs in the lower elementary through high school years. Social sciences often cover the same topics but in a different way. Social sciences stress the analytical aspect of the subjects. We learn to take, organize, and analyze the statistical data about man as an individual, man as a member of social groups, man as a member of community, and man in broad ethnic and national groups. It has more of the feel of science, and often involves experiments and surveys and focuses less on surface facts and more on motivations for actions. Interestingly, history is NOT considered a part of the social sciences because one cannot do experiments on past events and then recreate them. History is, therefore, considered a humanities subject for social science people.

Now, we will turn our attention to what is usually taught in schools, social studies. Generally, this means history and geography. Now this will take two blogs, so be prepared.

First, let's look at history. There are a number of ways to teach history. By its nature, history is a chronological subject. That is, one should teach it in time order. That being said and before I lose the unit studies people, let me say that one can study topics in history. To do it well still requires some sort of connection to a time line. That means that your student (or yourself) needs some way to hang the topic in time and space.

I can choose to study clothing as a history element. However, unless I also link that study to dates and places, my student will not know whether pantaloons came before or after George Washington nor will he know why that is important to know. Some clothing styles came into popularity because of odd political, geographical, or social events. Try this link for a fun read. http://www.poloindia.com/historyoftrousers/right_frame.htm

Studying the clothing without studying the events will not help the student truly understand the development of clothing. For example, certain hat styles came about when a popular queen started going bald and began wearing hats to cover her baldness. The people loved her so much that they wanted to copy her hats. So the question should be asked, why was she so popular that people wanted to be like her? The answer would come from studying her policies and her government, the wars into which her country became involved, the economic situation, etc.

Without the chronological study as well, the student is faced with an endless series of facts swirling inside his head. In other words, unit studies without chronology is like teaching history for a Trivial Pursuit game: nothing but unconnected facts that may or may not get you a chip. If you like the unit studies approach, make sure that you incorporate timelines and that your children have a strong basic understanding of history before beginning the study.

Another interesting approach to teaching history involves breaking history into broad categories, such as Old Testament history, Greek history, Roman history, medieval history, etc., and then taking a year to study each. I have to admit, I love the idea of this idea. If I could begin from the beginning with my kids, this would probably be a strong way to do this for the elementary grades. It does require a 4 or 5 or more year commitment to that one style and to homeschooling. It requires you know and don't fear being out of sync for testing for a few years, which isn't a bad thing, unless you worry about where you are all the time. For the upper grades, the multi-year study would not be as good, as you SHOULD then be spending more time looking at history's broad strokes and patterns, making all the dots connect from all the various histories you've studied and trying to understand the complex reasons behind things.

One weakness I have seen in the multi-year approach has to do with the fact that the underpinnings of our current world are anchored in those earliest of times. In this approach to history, those early times are studied at the youngest age when a student is least able to understand the political policies and the writings of those ages. Very few 2nd and 3rd graders can follow Caesar's Gallic Wars, although it is well written and easily followed by a more mature mind. Cicero's writing, pithy pieces and, by the way vastly applicable to today's politics, would not connect with the mind of young children.

What ends up happening is that the students study the curious aspects of Roman culture with brief interludes into the history and military battles; such things as the economics that were driving the military situations and the slavery needed in a society that valued freedom almost as much as Americans did 20 years ago cannot be studied as the mind is not yet ready. The student, and parent, believes he knows Roman history because he knows what they ate, how they dressed, how they built their houses, and how they were transported. He knows how their weapons are used but doesn't have the analytical ability or geographic knowledge yet to understand WHY they are being used.

These cultural facts that cause the students to believe they have studied the history leave them unprepared for dealing with modern world history and American history when they are older. Those histories depend upon an understanding of the older ages' philosophies and policies, things which couldn't be covered at the much younger age. So perhaps there is a major drawback to this approach to history for the young, that of matching mind skills with topics. Does that mean not using this approach? No, it means working this approach so that this weakness is resolved.

Deciding upon an approach to teaching history must include an awareness of the mental development processes within a child. We must also get past our own boredom with relearning something we learned in our childhood and realize that THEY haven't heard it and THEY NEED this material. We must understand that, in early years, children are best equipped to learn vast quantities of facts (dates, places, names, etc.) attached to general themes, such as time placement of the facts. They memorize easily. We do not, and we feel bad that we are asking them to memorize things. So we decide, let's build something instead of memorizing things. Instead, do BOTH! Memorize AS you are building things.

Scripture tells us that one way to teach our children their scriptures is to write them on the doorposts, the walls, our foreheads, whatever is needed to do the memory work. So take that example for your facts work.

Put a list of the ten highest mountains & their locations on the wall next to the toilet. Don't tell them to memorize it. Just put it there. Mention mountains in your conversation. "I've heard about this mountain called Mt. McKinley. I was wondering if it would be a good vacation to go there. What do YOU think? Do you know where it is? No? Hmmm. Okay." Don't tell them to go find out. Yet, sometime soon, the child will come back with the information you wanted them to know. "Mom, I found out that Mt. McKinley is in Alaska." This is called subtle memory work.

However, overt memory work is great as well. Let's come up with ten lists of ten things to know this year, kids. How about the ten largest American cities, the ten highest mountains in the world, the first ten presidents, ten top inventors and what they invented, ten elements from the periodic table, ten great composers & the name of one of their famous pieces, ten great American artists, ten Impressionist painters, ten birds and what they look like, ten vitamins we need, etc. Each month, choose one of the lists and, at the start of the day, just read the list out loud together once. In 3 weeks or less, your child will probably have the list memorized just from reading it out loud. Then the next month, start another list.

Another approach to history is to use good textbooks. Good textbooks are broken into units on specific topics. They give you a broad overview of a time period, and then you have the chance, if you are interested, of doing an in-depth study of a part of that section.

For example, the Bob Jones University Press 4th grade American history text has standard history chapters. I had my children read a chapter on Monday or on Monday and Tuesday (depending upon the length of the chapter), and then we orally did the questions over lunch. On Wednesday, we (sometimes me, sometimes them) picked some topic within the chapter and researched it (sometimes I'd have the books ready ahead of time, sometimes not) on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was a great day for either choosing another topic for a quicker, one day study, or we might watch a video or build something or go somewhere related to the study or even read about the first topic more.

The textbook allows you to have someone else - the textbook author - do the basic research for you while the teacher's manual will tell you other ideas and projects. I mean, the purpose of studying history is to learn from the past, so do that by not feeling like you must reinvent the wheel by doing all the setup work yourself. Rather, you can allow someone else (an author) to do the grunt work of setting up a time period for you in the textbook. The author also gets to run around looking for the information at libraries, etc., instead of you doing that and wasting gas and energy and irreplacable time. Textbooks can be an extremely easy and interesting way to teach history while making sure you have all the connections in place. Just use the textbook instead of letting it rule you.

Jesse Stuart, a famous Appalachian teacher who did extraordinary things with his students, came to the conclusion after decades of teaching that the student's ability to learn had much more to do with his enthusiasm level regarding the subject than it had to do with the difficulty level of the subject. To go with that, remember that feelings follow actions. If you act angry, you will become angry. If you act like you like something, you may find that you do. Try it as you teach history and geography this year. It will change how much your students enjoy this fabulous subject. Know the approach you choose to use and eliminate its weaknesses; no one way works for everyone, but we DO need to understand the broad picture of what is taking place in our teaching and in our students' learning.

Suggested reading: Jesse Stuart's The Thread That Runs So True

Teaching Geography: see the next blog.