by Abbi Sharp

Created on: April 13, 2011

It is possible for kids to fall in love with history. Sometimes the teacher's attitude toward history can effect the students' attitude. A teacher who loves and is excited about history will do things to make his or her students excited about history. It's important for a teacher to get excited about these real life stories that make up who we are today. Using these tools can add to creating a love of history within your students.

Use Pictures, Paintings, or sculpture from or about the era

If there are photographs from the time period you are focusing on then use them. Dramatic photographs of the depression make what happened come to life. Telling about a time and place is not as powerful as showing a time and place. Art History is an amazing way to teach history because you include a visual aspect of events. There are many paintings from the French revolution. There are photographs from the American Civil War that also emphasize one of the earliest usages of the camera. Showing sculpture from Ancient Egypt if you are in a area close to an exhibit can be a great tool Sometimes exhibits travel around to areas that don't have access to national museum. It is worth your time to seek them out. Images are way to make history become real for children.

Use Video presentations

Imagine how powerful history lesson can be in watching the JFK assassination and trial in a 7th grade Texas history class. Videos can be of events in history or dramatic interpretation of events. Showing a film can help your students feel the mood of the time, which is the whole point of teaching history to your students. One example is to show To Kill a Mockingbird to teach about the Great Depression and the racial inequality that existed at the time. Movies can stem from powerful pieces of literature, and showing the movie can bring to life a time that is distant and unreal to children who live now.

Use Literature including Comics

Historical fiction, biographies, historical accounts of the era can help teach about history by drawing in our interest in through the use of story telling. The key to using these sources is to use all of them and to discuss the purpose of them. When using historical fiction you may want to remind your students of the definition of fiction and then to contrast that with the fact that biographies and historical accounts are real accounts. The key is to keep your students' attention in a way that they are mesmerized by what they are learning. Also, using comics in teaching history can help you reach students who may have learning disabilities in reading. I learned about the Conquest of Cortes through comics in 7th grade. My history teacher just laid out a comic on the subject that he was teaching. We still took notes on his lecture, but I remember events of that conquest because my teacher thought outside the box when it came to teaching history.

It is possible for history to become a favored subject for a kid. History can be exciting as story telling because history is a story. What makes it so wonderful is that its a story that really happened. There may or may not be tricks to making it interesting, but these are a few things to try.

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