Last night was the last show of the year at my kids’ History/Fine arts program. The “school” teaches a different time period each year, while teaching art, drama, and music with the theme of those classes also being closely related to what is taught in history class. This past year, they learned the modern time period.
Since it is an arts program, there are several performances each year. Last night, the kids put on a USO show with performances highlighting things they had learned this year. Besides the parts my kids were in, I think my favorite parts where the Abbott and Costello skits.
I realized early in our homeschooling career that I would have trouble teaching history because I thought it was boring and uneventful. History… Uneventful… Yes, I realize that was an oxymoron, but that is how it was taught to me. I did have a teacher in the eleventh grade, the year I we learned European history where the teacher cried when we talked about the holocaust. That was memorable. In addition, my American History teacher told a lot of bad jokes so I was able to use those to recall information for the test. Besides those two years, I really have no recollection of anything I learned in history class. When I heard about Masters Academy of Fine Arts, that would teach my kids history in an engaging way, I was overjoyed.
History is not uneventful. In fact, it is a series of events. To teach history in a way that bores a child to tears is a disservice to the children and an insult to those who lived the history that is being minimized at best. When history is taught in the order that it happened, it becomes a story. You cannot wait to hear what happened next. When you get to act out what happened in History you feel like you are living it. That makes it hard to forget. If your child can go through the whole six years of such a program, or even 12 (which would mean double exposure at different levels), you can rest assure that they truly know history.
Masters Academy may not be available all over the United States but there are a couple dozen locations. However, this model is taken from the classical approach to homeschooling, so if you cannot find such a program that teaches history immersion in order, you can purchase Kingfishers History Encyclopedia, as recommended by Susan Wise Bauer, the author of The Well Trained Mind. This will help you create a similar program yourself.
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