In most schools, the days are long gone when students studied history as an official record of factual knowledge. Reliance on one or two sources of information is no longer considered adequate.

Teachers are adopting different learning styles strategies and posing sophisticated questions: Is history an objective account that mirrors the “real” past or is it a collection of glimpses written by people with different assumptions, different frameworks, and different agendas? Many teachers try to take a learning styles inventory and incorporate differentiated classroom instruction.

State and national standards

Today, as in the past, your state’s curriculum comes first. It’s what teachers are required to teach and it’s what kids are tested against. Most states still adhere to the traditional “expanding horizons” curriculum, which begins in first grade with a focus on the family and progresses through elementary school to encompass the neighborhood, the community, the state, the country and, by sixth grade, the world.

Informing curricula throughout the country are the National Standards for United States and World History. They’re intended to serve as models that invite evaluation, revision, and adaptation, depending on what works best for different schools and communities. There’s a clear mandate to teach critical thinking skills so that students will be able to differentiate between historical facts and historical interpretations. The standards ask students to challenge arguments of historical inevitability, compare competing historical narratives, and examine material from multiple perspectives. According to the committee that wrote them, the standards are “specific enough to be meaningful, but broad enough to allow multiple approaches for curriculum development, which should remain a local function.”

“Critics fear the history standards, robustly infused with social history (but equally concerned with political, economic, intellectual, and religious history), will become ‘official knowledge,’” says one observer. “This assertion underestimates teachers, who are stalwartly independent and fully capable of using these voluntary guidelines as resources, not catechisms.”

History learning styles strategies in elementary school

Most educators agree that young children learn history best when it’s introduced within the familiar context of family, classroom, school, and neighborhood. According to the National History Standards Project, history instruction in grades K-4 should encompass the following five topics:

  • Living and working together in families and communities, now and long ago
  • The history of students’ own state or region
  • The nation
  • History of peoples of many cultures around the world
  • Historic discoveries in science and technology

Typical history activities at school

  • In a good elementary classroom, children studying family and community are being encouraged to talk to relatives and neighbors to get a picture of their immediate world through another’s eyes. When teachers ask questions like “Why do you think so?” or “Why do you suppose that was important?” even first graders can begin to think analytically about events and draw their own conclusions.
  • Hands-on activities are key. When a group of Massachusetts third graders visited the American Textile Museum in Lowell, the students were given identities as members of a pre-industrial New England farm family and allowed to experience a typical workday: They picked wool by hand, carded it and practiced weaving on a small hand loom. According to their teacher, visiting Lowell “provided a rich opportunity to explain how the geography of place impacted the history of Massachusetts and its people.”
  • As students move on through the elementary grades, they’re likely to be introduced to technical mapping skills, enjoying read-aloud historical fiction, and comparing historical perspectives.

Good history activities at home

  • Parents can help budding historians construct a family history project. Get in touch with older relatives and encourage them to talk about what it was like being a first grader way back when; or what they did for fun in the days before television; or what technological invention dramatically changed their lives.
  • Jot down notes and help your child organize a brief account, complete with illustrations and quotes. To keep things lively, dig deep for humorous anecdotes and juicy details.
  • Head for the local copy center and get reproductions made for giving during the holidays. Even today, there’s nothing like a homemade gift.