History is a significant part of our lives. Not only does it help you to learn about your culture and heritage, but it also helps to preserve it. Teaching history can be challenging because it is endless. Teaching it to children especially can be a rollercoaster because children lose focus quickly.
As a teacher, you have to develop engaging methods to ensure your young students are not losing focus. You can make learning American history enjoyable.
Below are six engaging ways you can teach children about US history:
Use Animated Pictures
Have you ever wondered why most children’s books have pictures? It is because the pictures help the kids process and understand information fast.
To help your young students understand history better, create some animated pictures of the events you want to narrate. In several cases, you can use real pictures. For example, if you teach about the September 11th ordeal, you can look or come up with some 9/11 picture books to help the children understand what happened.
You can also come up with definite pictures of the founding fathers. These pictures will make it easy for the children to remember the founding fathers.
History Trips
Too much studying without a break is monotonous. So is staying in the classroom reading about things that have been archived, and you can see them.
Once in a while, take your young students on a history trip. Let them visit some historical sites. Along the way, ensure they have fun so they won’t forget that day.
You can take the kids to the national archives, or they can visit some historical landmarks like Yellowstone national park. Along the way, you can explain what happened there and the importance of preserving historical sites and landmarks.
Personalize History
There are different methods you can use to personalize history. You will have to know your students well for this method to work.
Name one student at a time while you talk about a historical figure. Try comparing that historical figure to maybe a cartoon character that the kid loves. Draw some comparisons between the two characters.
When the exams approach, they will be easy to remember. They might like the cartoon characters more, but they will remember the comparisons you drew.
Use Stories
The American Revolution is one of the key historical events we talk about in the US. Teaching such a topic to children can prove challenging for them to understand.
Stories have been known to be very effective when teaching history. What you do is simplify the whole ordeal. Make it into a simple story but still maintain the core events. It will be more accessible and more entertaining for the children to understand and remember history this way.
You must be careful with this method. You can change the events very quickly, and that will be bad. You need to teach history as it happened.
Encourage Involvement
Teaching continuously without a break or involving the children is boring. You will bore your kids, and they will start sleeping. Kids lose focus faster than adults. You have to make the class more enjoyable by involving the kids in your teaching. Ask and encourage them to ask questions.
A fun way of involving the children is by giving them some assignments. You can tell them to work in groups or alone. The next day, they should come and present it to the class.
Make every kid feel involved. Call them by their names and encourage them. They will feel motivated and will want to learn more.
Use Films
Using films has been quite underestimated by many tutors. Has it ever occurred to you that most people prefer watching the movie instead of reading the book?
That is because most people cannot concentrate for long, and children are no different. There are great films that depict history. The movie Lincoln, for example, is an excellent history movie.
Closing Thought
Teaching US history to children does not have to be boring. You can make it fun by using the above six methods. These methods will ensure your kids understand and enjoy your history lessons. After all, we have to preserve and pass on our culture.
