Chavez Ravinela

Chavez Ravinela

Making History Come Alive: Engaging Teaching Strategies for Educators

How to Teach History in a Way Where History Comes Alive

The study of history is all about recognizing, collecting, organizing, and interpreting evidence. It includes a broad range of topics, from humanities to science, but the discipline is most often associated with the past.

Historians often use theories of behavior developed by other social scientists, but they do not begin with a predetermined view of history. This way they can avoid making assumptions before looking at the evidence.

Flashcards

Flashcards are a great tool for helping students learn new concepts. They encourage a learning strategy called Successive Relearning, which helps to lock information into long-term memory.

Educators should keep in mind that it’s important to simplify the material on their flashcards, as the brain can easily become overwhelmed with too much information. Each card should be dedicated to testing one concept or posing one question, which will help reduce cognitive load.

Students can make their own paper flashcards or use study apps like Quizlet. It’s recommended to shuffle and mix up the cards regularly so that students don’t fall into patterns of guessing the answer from their card order. This will prevent students from becoming complacent and may even make their study sessions more fun.

Movies

Movies can help make history come alive by introducing students to different cultures, time periods and historical events. They also provide a visual record of past eras — the clothing, style and atmosphere.

Movies like Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, bring the horrors of the Holocaust to life for students. They also provide a starting point for discussion of current issues like continued anti-semitism and white supremacy in the United States.

But movies aren’t always good teaching tools, as they often take artistic license with factual information to create drama and appeal. To be effective, a teacher needs to know the proper subject matter and learning goals before using a film in class.

Taking a Walk

Imagine history by looking at your world as an anthropologist or historian. Jump rope chants, jokes, the way your parents or grandparents warned you, and celebrations are examples of folklife, the everyday creativity around us that makes up history.

Research shows that students retain information better when their bodies are in motion. Take your class on a gallery walk where they review posters or objects that represent a particular historical topic.

Taking walks can help inspire new ideas, as well. Writers love to walk, and it’s no wonder: walking is a great workout that also helps the mind think. Just ask Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell or Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who solved a problem during his daily walks that led to the quaternions used in electric toothbrushes and mobile phones.

Creating a Timeline

Whether you are looking to highlight your business’s growth or simply show off a collection of milestones, timeline templates can make the job easier. Visme’s drag-and-drop diagramming tools allow you to quickly create an engaging timeline using icons, lines and pre-designed font pairs. It’s easy to emphasize certain dates – or even periods – by using bigger font sizes and contrasting colors.

Many teachers discover that a well-made timeline can help students understand the overlapping and confluence of historical events, cultures, and people. It also helps kids grasp that George Washington and Catherine the Great were contemporaries, or that the invention of fire and the printing press occurred at the same time.

It can be fun for students to create timelines of their own lives, marking important events such as family vacations or school milestones. This allows students to connect with history on a personal level and can be particularly effective for learners with visual, mathematic, or kinesthetic intelligences.

Making Connections

Using storytelling, experiential learning, visual aids, and relevance to student experiences helps make history come alive. These teaching strategies also encourage students to use reading comprehension strategies that will help them better understand the past.

One of the most common and effective reading strategies to teach is making connections. The research behind this strategy is that it activates students’ prior knowledge which increases their understanding of the text they are reading.

The types of connections students can make are text to self, text to text, and text to world. Provide students with recording sheets that allow them to mark the different connections they make while reading. This way you can easily see which types of connections each student makes and how well they are mastering the strategy.

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A Journey Through US History

History of the United States

History is the study of conditions and events that have shaped human society. The United States is a young nation with an old history.

Broad trends shape this history-immigration, urbanization, religious and educational reforms, abolitionism, Westward expansion, and a growing sense of global power.

Colonial Period

Amid abundant natural resources, colonists developed a remarkable economy. Moreover, their standard of living was among the highest in the world at that time.

Most colonists viewed themselves as members of the town or colony in which they lived. They valued regional identities, much as sports fans root for their team.

Many activities – we call them “ugly” colonial activities — relied on labor and tribute from natives to achieve profitability. This is why we associate them with low levels of long-run economic development.

Revolutionary Era

The Revolutionary War brought about fundamental changes to the United States. With the help of France, 13 American colonies rebelled against Britain’s imperial rule.

The patriot cause inspired other democratic revolutions around the world. It also gave rise to new ideas about equality. Even groups excluded from immediate civic equality—such as women and slaves—drew inspiration from revolutionary ideals.

After the American victory at Saratoga, Congress adopts a series of land ordinances that open the West to settlement. But the new nation faces many other challenges.

Civil War

The Civil War cost a lot of lives and scarred American society profoundly. But it also preserved the nation created in 1776 and transformed it into one that taxed its citizens, drafted them into the military, and amended the Constitution to free slaves, assure “equal protection under the law,” and give black men the vote.

A cultural gap between North and South remained after the war. It fueled debates over Reconstruction and persists to this day. The war also set new standards for military behavior and shaped modern ideas about the role of governments.

Reconstruction

The years immediately after the Civil War saw a bitter struggle over Reconstruction—the return of the Southern states that had seceded, the status of ex-Confederate leaders and the legal, political and economic rights of African Americans. Congress passed legislation and constitutional amendments to promote racial equality.

President Lincoln and his successor Andrew Johnson advanced moderate programs, but they were defeated by Radical Republicans. During Radical Reconstruction, Black people gained a voice in government for the first time, winning election to southern state legislatures and even the U.S. Congress.

The Gilded Age

From 1860 to 1900, American industry exploded and the nation became a dominant world power. Yet it was also an era of corruption, poor working conditions and monopolistic corporations.

The era is best known for the scornful book of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age (1873). It was a time when superficial displays and misleading artifice led daily life, with money and a desire to appear wealthy predominated. Yet this era shaped modern America in many ways.

The Progressive Era

At the turn of the century, many Americans were dismayed by what they saw as a growing inequality in economic policy, political consensus, and community activity. They wanted a government that was more efficient, honest, and fair.

They favored reforms to eliminate business exploitation, curb corruption in city governments, and improve living conditions in slum areas. The work of investigative journalists known as “muckrakers” livened public awareness of social ills. Reformers at the local, state and national levels pushed for government action to address these problems.

World War I

World War I introduced the world to trench warfare, poison gas and lethal new technologies. It ended with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires and ushered in a period of nation-states.

Medical advances made during the war included screening for tuberculosis, treatment of tetanus and vaccinations against venereal disease. The army also standardized testing for recruits, which would later lead to the SAT and ACT. The war also led many to abandon the idea of global benevolence and embrace pacifism.

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