Written by contributor Kris Bales of Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.
History is boring!
Okay, not really, but that’s definitely how I felt when I was in school. Now, history is my favorite subject to learn alongside my kids and one of their favorite subjects, as well.
What’s made the difference?
In large part, it’s due to learning history through historical fiction and biographies, rather than a textbook. Nothing puts a reader in a particular place or time better than getting engrossed in a great story.
Biographies allow readers to learn history through the lives of men and women who lived it.
Biographies show, rather than tell, the reader what it was like to live during the events that make up our history. You can experience the uncertainty and wonder with which the subject lived without the benefit of today’s hindsight.
One of my favorite parts of reading biographies is the ability to make connections that could easily become lost in a textbook. In a textbook, you might learn that Robert E. Lee married George Washington’s great-granddaughter.
However, after reading biographies of both men, you realize that the great-granddaughter Lee married was the daughter one of the grandchildren that Washington and his wife raised after his step-daughter’s death.
Biographies help us make connections about the people and events that affected history.
When learning history through biographies, you start to make the connections about whose lives intertwined and role the economy, geography, and world events played in our history.
For example, Samuel Morse started thinking about how great it would be if information could be transmitted rapidly after getting stuck in England during the War of 1812. He was reminded of this when he didn’t find out for several days that his beloved wife had died while he was in Washington D.C. This led to his invention of the telegraph.
Just recently, we learned that Thomas Edison was hired by Western Union to make improvements on Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Western Union had declined to purchase Bell’s patent.
By the time they realized what a mistake this might have been, Bell had already started his own company to produce the telephone, a move that looked very threatening to Western Union’s telegraph operation. The only way they saw to rectify the situation was to create a better telephone.
Historical fiction lets readers see what it might have been like to live through an event or during a period of history.
Really good historical fiction is true to the events in history and the main players while allowing readers to view the action through the eyes of someone to whom he or she can really relate – in our case, this is usually a teen or tween from the time period.
You may wonder how students can really learn history without memorizing facts and dates, but when biography after biography, along with some good historical fiction, continually weave the events and the key people together, you start absorbing their stories as your own and the dates and facts become part of of your story.
And, isn’t that what history truly is?
What biographies or historical fiction have made a lasting impression on you and your kids?