Catholic

Our Catholic faith is central to all areas of our lives. The Catholic Church is deep in history and studying the history of our faith will deepen your understanding of God's plan for the world. Our Lord is truly the center of all history!

The first base for a Catholic history education is solid catechesis, teach your children the beauty and truth of the Catholic Faith. Chances are, like many of our generation, you didn't learn the faith as well as you could have. I strongly urge you to always be deepening your own love for and understanding of the Catholic Church. There are dozens of excellent books on Catholic spirituality and apologetics from small, orthodox Catholic publishers. A reading Catholic is a growing Catholic! Live your faith. Share your faith. It’s a cliché, but most of your child’s faith will be “caught, rather than taught.”

In his book, “The Restoration of Christian Culture”, the late Professor John Senior cried out for reclaiming the joy of our faith. He wrote, “I fear sometimes that conservatives, not just liberals, are like the Pharisees –Catholics, but with a strong, unloving determination to be right; whereas the Camino Real of Christ is a chivalric way, romantic, full of fire and passion, riding on the pure, high-spirited horses of the self with their glad, high-stepping knees and flaring nostrils, and us with jingling spurs and the cry “Mon Joie!” –the battle cry of Roland..”

I want my children to be head over heels in love with their God and their Catholic faith. To want to cry out to the world, “My hope is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth!”

If your children are young, choose a good children's Bible and read it to your children. I do recommend that you at least begin with Catholic editions because the Bible is a fully Catholic book. Protestant Bibles, even the ones for children, sometimes misinterpret Biblical stories or use poor translations of the Bible. In addition to these problems, they always omit certain parts of the Bible, they don't include Maccabees and other books from the Old Testament, they also conveniently leave out stories they can't explain or find too controversial. Try finding Jesus' Bread of Life discourse from the Gospel of John in a non-Catholic children's Bible!

Older children, teens and adults should read the Bible itself, but we all need guidance to understand the Big Picture - the story that is being told through the Word of God. Don’t just read the Bible, strive to grow in understanding of Scripture through the guidance of the Church. Protestants know the Bible from cover-to-cover, but the Catholic Church understands Scriptures. Learn from Her! I have several excellent titles to recommend for learning to understand what the Bible is all about, this is your best preparation for teaching history.

My top picks are Jeff Cavin’s Great Adventure : A Journey Through the Bible, which includes a wonderful timeline incorporating several ancient cultures into the study of the Old Testament and Scott Hahn’s Salvation History tape series. These are easily accessible to Junior High through adult learners and will increase your love for and understanding of Scriptures as well as history. This will give you a solid base from which to study other cultures and time periods.

Chronological

We believe that a chronological approach to history is the best way to put the events of history into proper perspective. History is not random, events have causes and effects, personal choices have consequences. History is a long story composed of many shorter stories which occur in specific times and places. Ordering your study of history chronologically promotes greater understanding.

Once your family is ready to embark on a systematic journey through history you will want to consider how you want to approach the various time periods as well as the teaching methods you will employ.

The first idea I’d like you to consider is teaching history, at least in some part of your child’s school years, in chronological order. In the Great Adventure, Jeff Cavins compares the way most people read the Bible to picking up a copy of Gone With the Wind and just opening to a random page and beginning to read. You would soon become confused and discouraged because you are reading something out of context. The same is true with history. If history is a story, why would you begin in the middle, or as so many Americans do at the end of the story? How can we expect our children to understand the true significance of American history without being able to place it within the larger context of world history? Obviously I am a proponent of studying history chronologically – begin at the beginning and move forward at a pace that works for you and for the ages and interests of your children.

Fr. Albert Joseph Mary Shamon, a favorite author of mine and a gifted teacher, says “The two eyes of true history are geography and chronology. To understand the events of history, it is imperative to know where and when they occurred.”

History is not random, events have causes and effects, personal choices have consequences. History is one story composed of many events which occurred in specific places at particular times and people who lived in these times and places for reasons ordained by God Himself, the Author of History. To understand the connections between people and places we must study their context, this comes through "chronology and geography."**

Timelines

One invaluable tool for understanding the order of history, no matter what your family’s style involves, is a timeline. A good timeline is an essential tool for understanding historical relationships. Discovering that the Greek poet Homer was telling the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey around the same time that the prophet Isaiah lived in Israel or that Our Lady of Guadalupe was converting the Indians in Mexico at the same time that Henry VIII was leading England out of the Catholic Church are the kinds of connections that can be made through working with a timeline.

A ready-made timeline, such as Marcia Neill’s Catholic World History Timeline and Guide, or one that you make up yourself, coupled with a solid historical reading program is a satisfying and painless way to begin your journey through history.

Many people prefer to keep a timeline on a wall, but adding one to a notebook is a helpful learning experience for the student. And a timeline doesn’t have to be just a list of dates and events. Students can add names, events and illustrations within the body of the timeline. They can also add short paragraphs describing the people or events. While a wall timeline is valuable in giving the overall flow of history, notebook timelines allow each child to create a more detailed, personal timeline of a particular historical period. Older children especially enjoy looking back at the books they created when they were younger, and some add to them when they study a time period for a second time rather then beginning a new timeline.

Geography

Chronology is one eye with which to study history, the other eye is geography. In our family we study geography in conjunction with our history studies. Our family is well stocked with a good school globe, children’s atlases, historical atlases, outline maps for tracing and coloring as well as a map studies workbook here and there. As we read about a particular event we may look for its location on a map or globe, trace a blank outline map, labeling and coloring the various features to put in a notebook or on the wall. We also check out books and videos about a country or region we’re studying from the local library.  Our retailer, St. George Books and Gifts carries some wonderful blackline maps correlated with history eras.


Family Learning

We have found that history comes alive when the family learns together. Particularly if you are not well-acquainted with history yourself, or you are teaching multiple ages, studying the same time periods together will strengthen everyone's learning and interest and make your job of teaching simpler!


Integrated Subjects

History is unique, in that all things come to us through history. By relating other subject areas to the study of history we begin to understand that all knowledge is related, that nothing comes to us in a vacuum. We have found that our children's interest in other subjects has been enhanced by their study of history.

Integrating several subject areas in your homeschool has many benefits for student and teacher alike. For students it helps them build an understanding of the relationship and unity of all knowledge. Modern schools compartmentalize subjects to the point where many people today never consider the connection between mathematics and music, or science and history. And of course, religion is not just compartmentalized, it’s altogether banned in public schools! The majority of people I meet today, outside of homeschooling circles don’t think that religion has anything to do with their life other than on Sundays.

That’s the worst effect of compartmentalization in education. All subjects need to be examined through the lens of Faith, not separated from it, but permeated by it.

It has been said that true education is the building of relationships, making connections between seemingly unrelated facts and subject matter. How can this happen in a school where all the facts are tied up in neat boxes with little or no overlapping allowed? How can we call that education?

In addition to the benefits to the student, integrating or combining subject areas in your homeschool can make your life as a parent/teacher less complicated and stressful. Trying to educate multiple children at various ages and stages of learning and development in all the separate subject areas can lead very quickly to stress and burnout in the homeschool. Do the math, say you have 5 school-age children and each child has 7 subjects to “cover”. (math, grammar, reading, writing, science, history, geography) That’s 35 separate “classes” you have to keep track of in the course of a week! I’m exhausted just trying to keep track of all the pairs of shoes and socks in my house, let alone adding 35 classes to teach! And I haven’t counted in art, music, handwriting, spelling, Latin…..the list could send me to an early grave! No wonder homeschooling moms feel stressed. We need to find ways to simplify our homeschools so that school doesn’t take over our lives to an extent that there is no “home” left. I wise older mom once told me that because mothers are the heart of the home, it is of first and foremost importance that we find joy in our daily lives. If we as parents have lost the sense of joy and adventure in learning together we need to reclaim it – otherwise there will be no joy in our family life and schooling will become drudgery.

Skill and Content Subjects

A revelation to me was that there are two kinds of school subjects: incremental skills subjects and more generalized subjects. Incremental skills are such things as math, phonics and spelling, and grammar, and art and music technique. These subjects need to be practiced and developed systematically and consistently because the concepts build upon one another as the child develops.

Most other subjects can be taught in an integrated fashion using history as the connection that ties them together. In our family, our most successful years have been the ones when we study our skills lessons (the math and phonics, etc.) in the morning, each child doing the work they need to do independently or with me, and then we spend the rest of the day doing history. History class in our home includes: literature, geography, art and music appreciation, research, creative writing, reports, arts and crafts, science, poetry, drama, architecture………the list is nearly endless.

This “profitable field of knowledge” is the human discipline invented by the Greeks and Romans. They called it History, and we of the affiliated West follow them to this day. It was never a separate “Art” on the cycle of liberal studies. It was taught and learned as a part of the two comprehensive artes of human discourse, Grammar and Rhetoric.
- The Lord of History, by Msgr. Eugene Kevane

Developmentally Appropriate

Taking into account the developmental stages of your children will enhance their ability to learn as well as their enjoyment and will make your task as teacher an easier one! Read more about this in my article, "Learning History by Stages."

Teaching Young Children:

One of the questions I am most frequently asked is how early to begin teaching history to children. My usual answer is, if your children are young, 3rd grade and under, don’t necessarily start by teaching history as a subject. First develop a natural interest and curiosity in history at a young age by sharing good stories – read the Bible stories, myths and fables, fairytales, folk tales from various cultures and good books from a variety of time periods. [List of Good Books for early reading ] As I quoted in my earlier talk, Professor Rollin Lasseter of the University of Dallas writes: “History is stories. It has beginnings, middles, ends, and all its stories are events in the gathering action of one story, Sacred History, whose model is the Bible....As Catholics, we are preeminently the people for whom history matters. There is a Christian imagination of history, a Christian answer to the question of history. .... “...History is not only stories, it is the Story of Stories.”
[From "Light to the Nations: Reclaiming the Catholic Historical Imagination"]

To develop a love for history, develop a love for stories in your family. Read aloud to your children, every day if possible. Listen to books and dramatizations on audiotapes; watch a few good movies, or even some corny old ones like Jason and the Argonauts. Stimulate their imaginations and give them freedom to play and pretend– let them pretend to be living in another place or time after they’ve heard a story. When we lived in rural Wisconsin my children would go out to the barn and play “Catacombs.” Some would pretend to be Roman soldiers, the others were Christians hiding from them – if they were found they would be fed to the lions in the Coliseum. Later the same game evolved into Nazis and Jews.

These experiences help children to internalize the stories they hear and will remain with them as fond memories, far longer than reading a textbook or memorizing dates.

My young children spend hours, as many children do, playing Saint George and the Dragon, holding jousting matches on their bikes, and running around the yard in capes, swinging their stick swords. They are living history through their imagination and play time and I give them lots of time to do so.

When your children are ready for more formal schooling, you can gradually begin to study history in a more structured way, how structured depends on your teaching style as well as your individual children’s learning styles.

Older Students

You may be saying to yourself, but my children aren’t interested in history, how can I get them to study something they don’t like? This is often a problem encountered with older children who haven’t grown up in love with history, or in families who are more scientifically or mathematically-minded than my own.

Susan Wise Bauer, author of The Well-Trained Mind, writes:

“you can bring order to the mass of knowledge a student must learn by studying history, in chronological order, and relating other fields of study to this core material. History is well suited for this role, because history is simply the account of everything humanity has done, thought, invented, and dreamed about since the beginning of time. As filmmaker Ken Burns observes, no type of knowledge can be studied apart from history. The literature of the past, science and its progressive discoveries, the music of the masters--all of these are historical in nature.”

Everything has come to us through time – that’s what history means. So if your child has a particular interest or talent, use it to cultivate an interest in its history. Study the history of math, science, music, art, architecture and of course religion, whatever works to connect your child to the idea that everything develops over time and comes to us from the past. There truly is nothing new under the sun! Even computers have evolved out of simple ideas for computation needed in by ancient peoples in far away lands.

Active Learning

Most of us studied history with a textbook approach. Although a good textbook can be an important tool, we have found that to truly engage the student we must move beyond textbooks to a variety of outside reading, writing, discussion, research, and hands-on activities. We carry many wonderful resources to assist you in bringing history to life!

Compiling a History Notebook

An invaluable tool for organizing all this is a simple spiral notebook. Give each child a history notebook and have them collect and organize all their work in it. The notebook becomes a project in itself, a place to put the research papers, opinion papers, essays, stories, poetry and copywork, creative writing and reports, Illustrations, sketches and other artwork, lists of books read, pictures of projects, assignment sheets, child-made timelines, maps and charts, coloring sheets, just about anything the child does can be placed in a spiral notebook. If he makes a project, a clay model, or a lego cathedral, take a picture of it and put the picture in the notebook. Younger children can color and cut out pictures from historical coloring books, or use stencils and stickers to create their own pictures. Auxiliary supplies include a heavy-duty 3-hole puncher, plastic page protectors and a Polaroid camera loaded and ready to snap pictures of the latest creations.

The notebook becomes a record of the child’s work, a portable show-and-tell to bring to friends and relatives, an opportunity for the child to explain his work to dad on weekends or older brothers and sisters, a scrapbook of accomplishments and eventually a memory book of the good old days when we studied Ancient Greece or Medieval Italy.

Critical Thinking and Discussion

Especially when teaching older children, incorporating critical thinking, research, writing and discussion time can seem like a daunting task, but these are especially important to the intellectual development of the junior high and high school student.

In the document, "The Religious Dimension of Education", from the Congregation for Catholic Education we read:

"Teachers should guide the students’ work in such a way that they will be able to discover a religious dimension in the world of human history. As a preliminary, they should be encouraged to develop a taste for historical truth, and therefore to realize the need to look critically at texts and curricula which, at times, are imposed by a government or distorted by the ideology of the author. The next step is to help students see history as something real: the drama of human grandeur and human misery. The protagonist of history is the human person, who projects onto the world, on a larger scale, the good and evil that is withal each individual. History is, then, a monumental struggle between these two fundamental realities, and is subject to moral judgments. But such judgments must always be made with understanding. (III.2.58)

"To this end, the teacher should help students to see history as a whole. Looking at the grand picture, they will see the development of civilizations, and learn about progress, such things as economic development, human freedom, and international cooperation, realizing this can help to offset the disgust that comes from learning about the darker side of human history. (II.2.59)"

One of the more challenging aspects of homeschooling is the limited time the teacher has to discuss, in-depth, the material her children are reading. For this reason we recommend that at least one book t be used as a read-aloud particularly for your older children, perhaps after younger ones have gone to bed at night. Reading aloud fosters conversation and discussion like nothing else I’ve found. Another idea is to have a teen tell you about the book he/she is reading while you are doing household chores. Do dishes together or folding laundry together, or best of all, take a long drive with one child and have him or her sit in the front seat so you can talk.

Presentations

Another suggestion I want to mention before I take questions is scheduling regular opportunities to share with others what the children have learned. This offers them the chance to review the material as they share it with others and also provides a final goal and closure to a unit. This could involve making an oral presentation for family or setting up a display of papers and projects in a part of the house where others will see it when they visit. Some parents may wish to set up a web page with images or send out a homeschool newsletter that includes parts of the various activities. A family party could also be planned in which the children play the parts of famous people from the time period being studied and foods from the region are prepared as part of the meal. Appropriate decorations could be added and costumes constructed from fabric and sheets. For older children, this step in the process could involve taking a standard test during which the student has the opportunity to show the teacher exactly what was learned. Formal tests are not necessary, however, since the presentation itself becomes the test of what the student has learned.

I have found that this step also can foster cooperation among siblings as they plan and prepare an activity together. It can also boost a younger child’s confidence if they are given an opportunity to share what they have learned with the rest of the family members. Making each child in “expert” in one area of the unit, for instance the architecture or government system of the culture, can facilitate learning from one another as well as allowing the children to concentrate on studying and sharing information on an area of special interest to them. Be creative and flexible. Don’t think that each child needs to know everything there is to know about each unit. Each student will take from the unit what is most meaningful to him or her at this stage in their life. Keep in mind what we mentioned in the very beginning of this guide, avoid “cramming” information into a child, instead aim for instilling an interest in and love for learning which will last a lifetime!

There are several methods for achieving a study of history that incorporates these ideas. Every family has a unique combination of teaching and learning styles and you need to be aware of your personal teaching preferences as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each of your children as you discern how best to approach any subject in your homeschool.

In 2002, I co-authored the Connecting with History program. This guide to Salvation History incorporates all of the elements which I have mentioned:

A chronological approach to history from a uniquely Catholic perspective, incorporating the Bible, geography, literature and non-fiction reading selections, writing and research ideas as well as hands-on activities, ideas for putting together history notebooks and presentions. Volume One, which is currently available covers Ancient History and the Old Testament based on Jeff Cavins Great Adventure timeline. Volume Two, which is planned for future publication, will cover the New Testament and Early Church time periods.

Whatever method or combination of methods you choose for your family always keep in mind the Big Picture - the story of Salvation. That is what truly brings history to life!
 

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