This question has been asked three times this week so I am going to answer here as well for what it’s worth – which probably isn’t much lol! There are as many ways to educate well as there are children being educated. Ours is one way. If it resonates with you, then wonderful, I hope it is helpful. If not, that is ok too.

There were a couple different ways this question was posed. First, which history book do we use? This one has been raised a few times in regards to a few different age groups. The answer of course, is different when addressing different ages and stages. A few things remain constant however. When thinking about history and teaching history I always remember Dr. Ruth Beechick’s words in You Can Teach Your Child Successfully.

Children’s understanding of time is just beginning to develop. History teachers who have been on the job a long time know that this is so.

(Dr Beechick was a giant in the homeschool world when we began teaching our children and we have been blessed by her sensible, simple, approach. It is a pity the likes of such wise mentors has been largely eclipsed by new publications and voices espousing complicated methods which intimidate so many parents or convince them that there IS in fact a “right way” to “do history”.)

A young child struggles to wrap his mind around today, tomorrow, next week, and next year. To a 5th grader “when I grow up” is as far away as his birth. It equals a lifetime. It is not uncommon for the elementary child to confuse Grandma’s youth with George Washington’s era or wonder if there were castles and knights when Jesus was born. The actual dates are essentially meaningless to them. He is still wrestling with numbers as well, trying to make sense of math facts and times tables. Those tools are still unwieldy in his hands.

The younger the child the more he thinks in images. Your best bet is to work that to your advantage and share with him epochs. Help him to get a good picture of what bible days looked like, what Vikings were like, how a knight lived, who the pilgrims were, who built American log cabins, and who were the Indians they met. These things DO stick in their minds. They will not be able to sort them all out til much later but that isn’t our goal in the beginning. Initially you want to tell fascinating stories complete with vivid images and light a fire for all the vastly different ways people have lived through time. Children will marvel over folks who thought and felt so much like they do and yet who dressed and worked so differently. This is our goal. Impart the wonder.

As Dr B says:

Through stories children catch on to the idea that people lived in the world before they were born and that their times and doings were different from ours.

The best ingredient… is the excitement of the parents. That at least is sure to have a lasting effect on children’s interest in history.

In later years – ideally middle and upper elementary grades – you can begin to discuss sequence in more depth. I don’t use a perfectly scaled timeline at first but the children retell the stories we read and we bind them together in order of occurrence. That way they can see that Jesus came after the pyramids but before castles and Grandma came after George Washington but before men walked on the moon.

This is a good time to introduce a history “spine”. A text book is necessarily limited in it’s ability to effectively transmit wonder. When you think of it, how could the stories of billions of people be told effectively by any one book? Many texts are also plagued by revisionist history, a desire to interpret the past according to our own biases and contemporary understanding. What a good text CAN do is to provide a framework into which all those images and stories can now be sorted so they will become a cohesive whole. A text without years of stories and images is dry and lifeless at best. Stories and images with no framework can become random trivia lost due to the child’s inability to pull them all together or to make connections.

So, in the early years we read widely and much. In middle elementary grades we begin to use texts – usually classic texts in our faith tradition – as a spine to organize our studies. We do not expect to cover an entire text in one year. Rather we spread out a text over a few years and add picture books, biographies and historical fiction to the mix to flesh out the data more completely. Bear in mind that in high school and college the student will usually employ survey texts that will sum up all that came before. So this is a process.

Remember also:

Since there is no widespread agreement on what should be taught in each grade you can be assured that you will do no lasting damage to your own curriculum by making adjustments that fit your situation.

This seems to be the most difficult concept for most adults to grasp. Surely there must be a correct order in which to teach history? Nope. I tell you truthfully. Nope. If you are skeptical then order catalogs from several major publishers and compare the scope and sequence of each. You will discover that one begins with the beginning of time in grade one and moves forward in strict chronological order each grade. Another will begin with local and family history and move outward to more abstract information. Others begin with American history and give world and ancient histories a nod in junior high. All will assert that their way is critical to success and may even suggest that failing to adhere to their system will lead to disaster. This is just not so.

Share the wonder, provide a framework, and trust that the stories which have captivated generations will work their magic on your children as well. Just exercise discretion. A first grader is likely to remember about as much cold hard history as you recall from that time in your own life. Work with their natural development and things will go ever so much better for you both.

A good list of picture books for history is here and here

Laura Berquist’s Mother of Divine Grace School is one of the few Catholic correspondence programs to employ this approach.

Rainbow Resource Center sells numerous literature and activity based history studies from varied publishers. A quick google search will turn up tons more.