Some background. I love history and for a very long time i was considering a career in ghe field. To me it’s a very important and too often overlooked subject.
The schools in my area barely glance over world history. The Hellenic, roman and egyptian periods are about one class long each, and they don’t even cover the rich mythology or art. world war I and II are covered only on how it affected my province. The causes and why they even began are not covered. They didn’t even know what the Holocaust, and have no idea why nazis are bad.
I decided to give them a crash course during our confinement, but I must admit I’m at a loss because my own studies are far behind me and I want to make sure to give correct information.
Any help, be it a website or book with a good curriculum would be greatly appreciated.
Excellent question! We wrote a Monday Methods post that might help: Thinking about History Education as an Unexpected Homeschooler. There's a number of resources and ideas for you but I especially want to stress the section on videos. Lots of helpful people have recommended particular videos but I'm going to use my strongest and clearest teacher voice to say all videos are problematic when it comes to teaching history to young people. So, friends, please stop dropping links to videos as a whole answer. That isn't because the creators of the video are intentionally creating bad videos or that the videos can't be useful, but because they're decontextualized and turn the viewer into a passive student of history. Our first pedagogical goal when teaching young people history is to teach them to be an active reader and watcher. From the previous response:
Think of history videos you can find online as existing on a continuum. At one end – the less good end – there are videos done by influences who are interested in hits and advertising (they tend to claim they are telling the unknown history about something or use phrases like, “What historians don’t want you to know!!”.) At the other end – the more good end – are videos from historians, universities, authors, and educators. In the middle are videos like Crash Course. It’s difficult for us to go through and assess the quality of each video that’s out there, though we’re always happy to host questions about different videos so the community can answer.
One approach is to give students questions to consider as they watch. Such as:
- How did the author of the video support their claims?
- What details in the video have you heard other authors repeat? Or disprove?
Regardless of what video your student ends up watching or what website they end up reading, focus on encouraging them to be a critical reader. The “Reading Like a Historian” project out of Stanford has a number of lessons we encourage your learner to engage in before they begin researching a topic. The goal is to get them comfortable with the differences between primary and secondary sources [which is a lot more complicated than it seems at first pass], how to check a citation or link, and a general sense of when a detail from the historical record has been accepted as fact. Basically, you want to make sure they are comfortable in the space between questioning what they read on the internet and trusting historians in order to develop their background knowledge. It’s also worth giving them practice in a skill known as “lateral reading.” (More here on what this skill looks like.)
If you're interested in seeing a full history course, complete with a syllabus, tasks, and videos, a good model is Dr. Joanne Freeman's American Revolution course through Yale, especially the first segment. It's geared at college students but she's accessible and simplifies complicated concepts.
The second first pedagogical goal of teaching young people about history is building their background knowledge - which means reading. Lots and lots of reading. I'm an advocate of old fashioned paper texts so the reader can take notes as they read. (More on how to teach young people how to annotate texts here.) I personally love reading history textbooks written in the early 1900s - long before women's history became a branch - for a bunch of reasons. First, I always learn new words while reading. Second, the passages are dense, so I have to do a lot of "I think what this says is..." which is good practice. (An example of one such text.) And third, it's a good reminder to consider questions about historiography and who gets written into or out of history books.
Finally, and this is firmly putting on my curriculum designer hat, don't feel compelled to follow a chronological or geographical pattern. Instead, you may want to sit with your children and brainstorm some big interesting questions they want to wrestle with. These big questions, known as Essential Questions, can shape your entire curriculum, an entire unit, or a short project. (More on EQs here, along with examples.) And this is a unit organized around an EQ (it's a bit outdated but it works as a model.)
Happy teaching!