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Connecting
Your Family with History
Six
years ago, in the Jubilee year, our family began a home business and apostolate, RC
History, to provide a place for
Catholics to find reliable resources for studying history and the Catholic
Faith. We had been using history as the center of our family’s education for
many years, and had become convinced of the importance of understanding true
history, but were also frustrated by constantly having to sift through piles of
booklists and catalogs looking for the books and materials we wanted to use. Our goals are to offer you reliable information, books and
materials which will enhance your study of history and strengthen your faith as
a Catholic family without having to do all the searching and sifting that we had
to do when we were starting out.
Our
vision for studying history:
Catholic
Chronological
Family-Centered
Integrated
Subjects
Developmentally Appropriate
Encouraging Active Learning
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. RC
History 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 a history curriculum called
Connecting
With History. 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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