History is a Story: Teaching History the Interesting Way

This Lens, like all the "chapters" of Noori's Library, can be considered a work-in-progress and I expect to expand and reorganize it many times as I discover or rediscover literary treasures, add commentary and other extras, and improve my organizational systems. I hope you will find it useful and stop back often for updates!

Just about every year, it seems, a study comes out demonstrating that American students' knowledge of American history is poor at best, and their knowledge of world history pathetic in the extreme. You can dispute the methodology of these studies until the cows come home, but the fact is, there is a problem, and I believe its foundation lies in the way history is taught in our public schools. All too often, teachers and educators forget that history is, first and foremost, a story, and every child loves a good story.

We have seen over and over again around the world that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. These are some of the best books and resources I know to help parents, educators, and homeschool parents alike rekindle a love of history in our students, so that they can be best assured of avoiding history's mistakes and repeating its triumphs.

One fun way to enrich your study of history is to build a timeline on one of the walls of your house. These can be homemade or purchased. My family purchased one from Calvert School that came laminated and included a starting selection of great authors, artists and musicians, which we used as a template when creating other timeline figures.

Timeline figures can be as simple or elaborate as you want. Ours started out simple - a cutout wearing pants for a male or a dress for a female, a name, date, and some indication of his or her great achievements. Later on costumes and methods of conveying information became increasingly elaborate and creative and my siblings and I held several Academy Award-type competitions with awards such as Best Hairstyle, Best Props, and Best Non-Standard Figure (a perennial favorite at the latter was my sister's depiction of the Boston Tea Party: a painted and feathered colonist peeking out of an enormous teacup.)

Ideally, the timeline should be large enough to allow for expansion as children develop individual areas of special interest. Ours included particular emphasis on medieval British history, women's history, and the American Civil War, courtesy of myself, my sister, and my brother, respectively. After the first timeline awards were held, anyone who could be expected to have a particularly cool costume also experienced an immediate jump in popularity. In later competitions, for example, my brother's depiction of Shah Jahan received high marks for both costume and props. One really can't beat the Taj Mahal.

One of the best ways to make history truly come to life is through travel. It's nearly impossible not to get a sense of history when you're standing on the spot where it was made.

I was lucky enough to have parents who love travelling. One of the first things we did after starting to homeschool was to take an extended trip following the Oregon Trail by car from Independence to Oregon City, Oregon. We also took advantage of my father's government job to spend nine months in Washington, DC, visiting historical sites galore and taking a few extended trips to visit Southern plantations, Civil War battlefields, and other historic sites in Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and other Eastern states that were less accessible from our native Midwest. Even better, when I was 17, my sister and I were able to accompany our aunt and uncle on a month-long tour of France, which included everything from prehistoric cave paintings to medieval castles and cathedrals to World War II sites. And in college, I studied abroad in St. Petersburg, Russia and saw first hand everything from Scythian gold to the palaces of the tsars to buildings and bridges throughout the city that still show damage from shrapnel (or worse) received during the Nazis' long and devastating siege of Leningrad, as well as being able to talk to survivors of the siege.

Regardless of whether you're going to the next town over or to a foreign country halfway around the world, make an effort to learn about the area's history in advance and visit historical sites or museums when you go. History museums, much like history books, range from the crashingly boring to the utterly captivating and you'll quickly learn your family's preferences and tolerences.