On teaching kids boring history... and a few free not-boring texts

While my kids are now provisionally back in school after COVID-19 lockdown, I have homeschooled them in English for years because we live in a non-English-speaking country and I also tutor other kids, I have a subscription to Education.com, a major site for teaching materials and lesson plans.

Most of the time, I’m pretty satisfied with Education.com, including their online math and typing games, which come in quite handy. This isn’t so much a rant about one site but rather a critical look at the way history is taught in elementary schools in general.

Creative Commons image by Odleywonderworks of Flickr.com

I can’t even say that the US is particularly bad in this regard. At least, in some American schools, they incorporate projects, plays, dioramas and historical reading into history. But the basic teaching materials, the textbooks and worksheets, which get used to fill in the gaps are still excruciatingly boring.

A lot of progress has been made in the US to teach more truthful and balanced history, since I was a child. When I was a kid, I remember being terribly frustrated by social studies and history classes, as well as horrendously bored. I could tell that just beyond the droning on about pilgrims and pompous founding fathers, there were amazing stories that I wanted to hear. Maybe I sensed this because of the things I heard at home, but at least it kept me from condemning the entire subject of history the way a lot of my friends did.

Today, the standard materials for American history classes are much more diverse and include a lot of famous women and people of color. There are still parts where the focus is heavily on the lives of the rich and powerful at the expense of the people I can relate to, but there has been progress.

Still, that isn’t even the crux of my problem with history teaching in schools and I see the same problem in a vastly different culture, where the focus is on their own history. In the briefest terms, the problem with the history materials is simply boredom.

Don’t get me wrong. Now I love history. When I was in high school, I joined a medieval history club. When I was a newspaper journalist, my history graphs inserted into news stories to give background always packed a particular punch. I devour historical fiction and non-fiction alike. But the stuff we give kids in lower elementary grades is just a mishmash of mediocre writing, disconnected facts and cumbersome official terminology, not to mention the dates, which most younger kids are not remotely prepared to comprehend.

Most early elementary students have a shaky grasp of time beyond a few months ago, let alone the span of human history. Inserting a beginning date to any event can start students along the path to understanding timelines. Constructing a visual timeline will eventually help. But overuse of dates that kids can’t relate to turns their brains off faster than anything I know of.

The other thing that turns them off and results in a lot of frustration for me as a parent is the use of unnecessarily difficult vocabulary and official terminology. Granted, my kids are bilingual and they have learning disabilities. They speak English conversationally, but it is their second language and their vocabulary isn’t up to grade level, despite all of the bedtime stories I’ve read to them over the years.

But even for native speakers., elementary history texts are overburdened with official phrases. While adults may be hung up on the importance of terms like “received an honorable discharge” or “considered to be historical treasures” and have good reasons for them, the fact is that most kids will actually understand and care a lot more if they read that someone “left the military” or that “many people feel that this building is very special because of its history.”

I am likely to get a lot of pushback here from educators who insist that “dumbing down” the texts or oversimplifying harms kids. I’m not asking for a dumbing down and the level of complexity is really up to how long the teacher wants to spend on the subject. The question is simply whether or not you use vocabulary and sentence structure that most of the kids have any experience with.

I have little patience with those who argue that this is a matter of slower kids holding back the high achievers. I was a bookworm and a voracious high achiever as a child and I too found the history texts boring and irrelevant. Even I didn’t understand all of the official terminology and the texts were unnecessarily focused on things that I couldn’t relate to. The difference was only that I could slog through them because I had a large vocabulary and a steady attention span. I still suffered and would have preferred well-written and kid-friendly history texts.

I am unfortunately not in the business of writing history textbooks for kids, but I did rewrite several short history texts for my kids during COVID homeschooling.

In the process I also noticed that the “reading comprehension” questions on many history worksheets actually reference facts not included in the text. So, I made sure that my questions do reference the actual text on the sheet to check for comprehension, rather than requiring previous knowledge to complete.

I offer these few here for parents who find themselves homeschooling, whether voluntarily or not. For native speakers, they will be useful reading material for second to fourth grade. For ESL students they will work well even up to sixth grade.

I will add more as I have time to write them, but even these few are proof that historical profiles can be made easy-to-read as well as interesting without sacrificing the most important facts.