Why the Most Important Moments in History Are Defined by Friction, Not Victory, and How to Teach Students to See It The night my daughter didn’t go to her extracurricular meeting and when we dropped off some of her siblings, she cried a little. In that moment she grieved something that was real and mattered,…
Here is something worth sitting with before you teach your next history lesson. Americans pride themselves on being straight-talkers that are practical and grounded. A pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, tell-it-like-it-is kind of people. We celebrate the self-made individual, the honest laborer, the person who does not need a gilded story to feel good about themselves. We have built…
We grew a small patch of wheat for the first time in 2022. Everyone was a part of planting and watching it grow. My oldest two used a scythe to cut it. The rest of us worked through threshing together, brainstorming as we went because our first attempts were far more labor-intensive than we expected….
Someone once told me they loved the idea of educational cookbooks but were intimidated by actually using them. The cooking felt overwhelming. I get it completely. Not every learning environment has a kitchen. Even if you homeschool with a full kitchen available, you might not want flour on every surface on a Tuesday morning. And…
Picture this: You’re watching a movie scene where a king signs a treaty in his grand hall. The camera focuses on his face, his ornate quill, the gilded document. The soundtrack swells. This is history being made. But what if you could grab that camera and swivel it 90 degrees? Suddenly you’d see the scribe…
Picture this: Twenty-five tenth-graders walk into my World History classroom to find an ordinary object sitting on each desk. A soda can. Before anyone could crack it open, I stopped them: “Imagine you’ve never seen this before. You’re on an archaeological dig 500 years in the future, and you just unearthed this mysterious cylinder. What…
A free mini-lesson that helps K-12 students understand that history isn’t just WHAT happened, but WHO got to tell the story Here’s a question that should make us uncomfortable: When we teach the American Revolution, whose version of events are we teaching? Think about it. After the Revolution, who wrote the textbooks? Who compiled the…
Ask a student to describe a historical figure like Thomas Jefferson or Marcus Aurelius, and you’ll typically get one of two extremes: Both of these approaches are educational dead ends. The first ignores the reality of human nature; the second ignores the reality of historical context. Neither builds critical thinkers. As we move toward the…
While most people start flooding the area of Lexington and Concord in the Spring, our unit actually originally took us there at the beginning of January. While most of the buildings were closed like the visitors’ center that closes November through March or even some of the historic houses that you can tour, we still…
Honesty first, I was skeptical taking a field trip to the Boston Tea Party Museum. I didn’t know that it would add much value to the kids’ education and I had my doubts that it would be worth our time or money. But in the end, it was fantastic and I plan on going back…
Elections are coming, elections are coming! And it’s an exciting time we live in. We have had our first African American president and now we have the first woman to run for president from a major political party. Plagued with ads on television, on the highway, and everywhere we turn, it’s apparent even to young…
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