{"id":81,"date":"2014-06-02T20:22:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-02T20:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/06\/homeschool-monday-teaching-history-backwards.html"},"modified":"2014-12-26T18:17:59","modified_gmt":"2014-12-26T23:17:59","slug":"homeschool-monday-teaching-history-backwards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/06\/homeschool-monday-teaching-history-backwards.html","title":{"rendered":"Homeschool Monday – Teaching History Backwards"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

(Yes, I\u2019m bringing back Homeschool Mondays! I needed a hiatus, but I\u2019m ready to hit the ground running with them again. As always, if there\u2019s a homeschooling topic you\u2019d like to see me tackle, please let me know!)<\/p>\n

History is one of those subjects that can be hard\u2026mostly because it\u2019s booooooringggg. Every year, I listen to the complaints and mutterings about \u2018how does this have anything to do with me\u2019 and \u2018this was all so long ago that the people are all dead.\u2019 I\u2019ve decided that my children are right. It\u2019s hard to take an interest in something, even when you use the best materials, if you can\u2019t see how it applies to yourself. That makes history,and its tales of long dead people hard for kids who are 8-14ish to relate to.<\/p>\n

I love history, and have been fascinated with the lives of those-who-lived-long-ago for as long as I can remember. It was never dead to me, but a living tapestry of stories and scandals. Just because something happened 500 years ago doesn\u2019t make it any less interesting\u2026.right?\u2026.who\u2019s with me?!? \u2026.. Not a single one of my children.They sigh and roll their eyes and do the minimum required to make me leave them alone.<\/p>\n

I asked my 12 year old, and he asked me why he should care. \u201cYou keep saying that these people did all this stuff, but who are they to me? They\u2019re just dead now.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that got me thinking. Who are<\/i> they to him? Why should<\/i>\u00a0he care?<\/p>\n

I turned that over and over for a few weeks before I remembered that we did our geneology a couple of<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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years ago and traced my mother\u2019s family back to France in 1290. That\u2019s a long time ago, and there\u2019s a ton of history between then and now. Last week, I started talking to them over dinner of this long lost relative, and they all just feigned interest. I could see that even though he had a familiar last name, they weren\u2019t able to connect the dots between there and now.<\/p>\n

This week I started over. I pulled out pictures of \u00a0their grandparents and started talking about the Vietnam War. Both of their grandfathers were in the Navy during that conflict, and my children perked up. They began asking questions about these familiar, albeit much younger, faces. We talked about hippies who protested the war, and the treatment soldiers faced when they got back home. We\u2019ve been discussing it for most of today. Tomorrow, we\u2019re going to hit on the school desegregation which happened while they were still students, and then go back to the invention of television (my dad\u2019s family had one of the first sets in town), and the widespread use of indoor plumbing (my mom can still remember when that became a reality for her family.) We\u2019re creating scrapbook pages of fashion, music, big news stories, what their houses looked like, and anything else we think might be important in telling their stories.<\/p>\n

Next week, we\u2019ll move back to their Great-Grandparents. One of mine drove a tank across Europe, and one of my husband\u2019s flew bombing missions over Germany. ( Their Oma\u2019s family was in Germany at the time, so we get both sides of the story.) The other grandparents were busy keeping the country fed, and one of my grandmothers was building war planes. From there it\u2019s the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the popularity of movies (the invention of talkies!), and Women\u2019s Suffrage.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re going to keep moving back in time from one relative to another, learning about them and the world in which they lived. We\u2019re not going to be talking about long dead people who are nothing to us, but grandpa\u2019s grandfather\u2019s grandpa who fought in the Revolutionary War under General Washington. Hopefully when we get to that point, those brave men will be more than just names \u2013 they\u2019ll be a link in the chain that leads to us and now. They\u2019ll be a part of the story of our family, and through them we\u2019ll learn about the history of America (the first relative was in Jamestown long before the Pilgrims got to Plymouth), and eventually Western Civilization.<\/p>\n

Our folks were there for a lot of the big stuff, and even when they weren\u2019t it affected their lives. The history in the books made the lives of the people-who-lead-to-us either easier or more difficult. The Plague didn\u2019t just wipe out people in Europe, it killed our ancestors\u2019 children. Joan of Arc didn\u2019t just point out and defend the King of France, but one of our people was a member of his court \u2013 he saw her and heard her tell of the power of God.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what we\u2019re doing. We\u2019re ditching the books in favor of The History of Us. We\u2019re writing the books ourselves, starting here and working our way back. The kids are excited to begin, and I\u2019m itching to go with them. Why don\u2019t you join us? Let\u2019s turn the boring history thing on its head by starting now and showing how it all leads up to here.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Yes, I\u2019m bringing back Homeschool Mondays! I needed a hiatus, but I\u2019m ready to hit the ground running with them again. As always, if there\u2019s a homeschooling topic you\u2019d like to see me tackle, please let me know!) History is one of those subjects that can be hard\u2026mostly because it\u2019s booooooringggg. Every year, I listen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHomeschool Monday - Teaching History Backwards<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(Yes, I'm bringing back Homeschool Mondays! I needed a hiatus, but I'm ready to hit the ground running with them again. 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