I would start with Strange and Interesting Things That Have Happened In Our Town. Headlines from old newspapers. Tours. Old houses and even excavations. Take a piece from the archaeologists and anthropologists: What would people say about us if 200 years from now all they had to look at was our garbage? Let's go visit a cemetery: why are there so many gravestones from 1918?

My grammar and high school history experiences were horrible - I never made any connection between history and my life. All I ever saw were names and dates to memorize. Bleagh.

For kids, I think interesting stuff happens close by. Then you start working outward: how people came here from different places, how battles were fought and why, what life was like for your grandparents. What your house would have looked like in 1900, 1800, 1100, 100 BCE. How did people in Ancient Rome go to the bathroom? (Kids love bathroom stuff.)

I would have them read historical material connected to their other classes: famous mathematicians and what they liked for breakfast, the origins of fences, food shopping in Pompeii. It wasn't till I was halfway through with college that the things I was being taught seemed to fit together somehow.

Make history relevant. Start with the local and move toward the global, start with now and work backwards (rather than the other way around). It took me so many years to become fascinated with history, rather than dreading it as a boring array of irrelevant facts to memorize.

United States of America, Grade 1, 6-7 years old.

Focus is on civics with an emphasis on being a good citizen of your city your state your country and the world. Basic introduction to local and world history.

Whenever possible lessons should be combined for learning across subjects. For example: Geography teaches what a river is. History teaches about the civilizations built around river valleys. Egypt was built around the Nile they built the pyramids and made mummies. Mesopotamia was built around the Tigris and Euphrates they built the hanging gardens of Babylon and wrote a set of laws called the code of Hammurabi. China, India the Amazon and the Mississippi each are mentioned in a similar manner.

Children should be able to name their city state and country and be able to find these on a world map and globe.

In the USA children should know that the US is a democracy and that voting is important to a democracy. Children should know that Native Americans lived in the USA before they were displaced by Europeans. They should then be taught that many immigrants came from all over the world to make the United States into what it is. They should know that in 1776 the 13 colonies freed themselves from British rule. They should know that the USA fought a civil war and that at the end of the civil war Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves in the emancipation proclamation. They should know that children were once required to work but that as a nation we decided it was better for children to learn than to work. They should know that the US fought in a large war called WW2 and that after WW2 the world was divided in a "cold war" where the whole world was threatened with nuclear weapons but no bullets were fired.

A short time should be spent on local history and this should be specific to each community. Suppose your school is called Fillmore elementary school. Children should briefly be taught who Fillmore was. Is your city one of 5 cities in America that celebrates Armed Forces Day as a major holiday? Well maybe they should know why your city celebrates that holiday.

The teacher should also pick one subject of interest to teach the children in greater depth such as Greek mythology maybe including Aesop's fables, or maybe Native American history and art. The key is that the teacher should pick the subject and it should be something the teacher is passionate about. If the teacher is very passionate about the subject they will do a great job teaching it and inspire their students to love history.

Most importantly as historians I think we need to focus on providing general guidelines and perhaps some general fact checking to ensure that the history being taught is not completely false. The actual teaching needs to be done by teachers and this includes the writing of the curriculum. With complete respect to my brilliant colleagues historians writing grade school curriculum is likely destined to end in disaster and tears.

I actually just conducted an experiment on this. It's mostly anecdotal but I feel still relevant.

I have a 6 year old daughter. About 3 months ago she came home and told me she had learned that we had a president named Roosevelt who had Polio. Seeing an excellent learning opportunity I sat her down and over the course of 3 hours and 4 glasses of chocolate milk I taught her all about new deal politics the great depression and ww2. Ten minutes ago I asked her about that talk. She remembers people didn't have jobs, there was a big war and I talked for a really long time. I have learned my lesson, I may know something about history but teaching 6 year old children about it is beyond my ability.

I've done it before. One of the companies I work for (www.distanceeducationconsultants.com) built an American History Curriculum for 5th, 8th and 11th grades using a 3D virtual classroom. Mostly for afterschool education, with online quizzes if teachers wanted to assess their learning.

It's a lot of fun putting together a curriculum, but you have to remember that you can never have a perfect curriculum. People will always find areas where they felt you didn't put in enough information, but the trouble is, you can't put everything in, or you'd need a full semester of college to accompany every unit!

And kids have vastly different reading skills. So you can either write the same unit multiple times for different reading levels, which is a tremendous amount of work, or you can target a certain level and then deal with the fallout from teachers who have kids that don't match the level you targetted.

That said, some general guidelines, especially for really young kids:

1. They have no real conceptual framework for the past. Time began when they were born. The #1 best thing I've found you can do for them is to put up a timeline around your entire classroom, and every time you talk about an event in history, slap it up on the timeline. This builds the conceptual framework for how far in the past, relatively speaking, all these different events were. Without this, what you see are all these kids who think it was the pilgrims on the Mayflower who rebelled in 1776, not realizing that there was about as much time between the Mayflower and the Declaration of Independence as between the Declaration of Independence and World War II.

2. As far as which events to cover, look at your state's standards. While I'm of mixed opinions on the standards, they are there to make sure that kids have hit all the major points at a basic level by the time they get out of elementary school. You can run through the list of standards and build curriculum based on each topic.

3. You should always attempt to tie it in with things that kids know. Bare facts that don't connect to anything tend to be forgotten very quickly. But when you relate facts to things kids know, then they tend to retain the information better. Even if you're teaching Revolutionary War history and you're living in California or Florida, you can still relate the material to the kids in a variety of ways. Ask them how they would feel if... and then run through the list of things the British did to the American colonists. (Or even take it down to their level, and ask them how they'd feel if they had to pay a quarter every time they brought in a new pencil to school.) Or you can show what was going on in the local area at the time of the Revolution, and point out local points of interest and what they'd have been like back then.

4. You'll never get away from political bias entirely, but try your best. Also, I'd recommend teaching a mixture of women's history, race history, multicultural history, working class history (typically considered left wing history topics) in conjunction with military history, and Great Person history (typically considered more right wing topics). That will lend a certain amount of balance to your education. Though, again, you'll never satisfy everyone.

I'm curious about what your background is and what you're asking this for. If I knew what you were trying to accomplish, I could probably help more than these general guidelines.

I'm in Canada.

For grade 1 (6-7 y.o.) you need to keep it exciting. Study dinosaurs and relate it to other subjects (what is a herbivore/carnivore), and include media (land before time, fantasia) so that they can visualize what they are learning.

Grade 2 - learn about native Americans, and how there were many tribes, include crafts and field trips when possible.

Grade 3 - study the middle ages, (I think we went to medieval times), and study not only castles, knights, etc. But also what did they wear? Have students make their own costume and do a show and tell

Grade 4 - learn about Mesopotamia and Egypt - ancient civilizations and how they developed and how advanced they were. Let students learn to write some cuneiform.

Grade 5 - by now, the students have a foundation to build on. Explain who the great explorers were, teach Aztecs and Mayans, and now 're-visit the native Americans and how they were impacted by the explorers.

Grade 6 - from the time of the native Americans to present day Canada & United states. Key topics would include the seven years war, war of 1812. British north America, New France, battle of the plains of Abraham, and Canadian confederation. Slavery and underground railroad.

Grade 7 - some world history of the 20th century - turn of the century and the Boer war. World war 1, the great depression, world war 2, and explanation of what the cold war was (very high level - iron curtain, Cuban missile crisis, overview of key events)

Grade 8 - either 're-visit previous year's topics in more detail (e.g. middle ages) or study a different region from a time span already discussed (Asian or African history in a time period where the focus was on north American or European history the first time around).

If done well, a student can gain a solid foundation of history without growing bored or overwhelmed. It is important especially in the younger grades, to overlap as much as possible with other classes and to relate things back to what they already know and understand.

Texas High School history teacher. Ideally, it would be great if they would cover geography in tandem with history instead of in relative isolation as it's done today.

I too would start local with history, but I would then transition to world history. Only after thoroughly covering world history would I then transition into individual histories of countries/regions/states. In Texas, students only receive one year of world history.

Additionally, I think it's important to focus on big picture concepts and their effects on how we live/lived. I'm sick of having students who know singular subjects but have no concept of chronology. My students come to me knowing the pyramids, manifest destiny,the holocaust, and MLK Jr..

I think I would organize it differently- instead of chronological order I would organize units into themes... The history of astronomy... The history of musical instruments... The history of architecture... The history of boats... I think you would probably need to start each grade's curriculum with a broad overview unit that lays out the general progression of written history in the western (and whole) world- which would increase in detail as the grade levels progress, but then you would use each unit's theme to tell more in-depth stories about particular points in history.

As a follow up to this thread, how would you design a curriculum for High School?

Could you explain what grades 1-6 are? Then I might be able to suggest something. If they're the equivalent to British Years 1-6, then that's a bit too young for me. I teach 11-18 year olds.

Dan Carlin had a relatively recent episode of Common Sense in which he discussed the challenges of teaching history (the why, the how, etc). I think he offered some very fresh insight into the topic. Hopefully you find it illuminating.

Episode 281: Controlling the Past

http://www.dancarlin.com/common-sense-home-landing-page/