How to Get Your Kids Excited About History?

Many people remember their history classes as being exceptionally dull. Unless they were lucky enough to have been blessed by a passionate teacher (or a resilient, innate passion of their own), history classes could be dry and boring. Tests might have amounted to having to remember lots of dates and names and battle details.

Get Your Kids Excited About History:

However, history is a subject that can be brought to life and filled with interest, intrigue, and narrative when taught well. Where is the missing link? And as a parent, how can you help awaken in your children an appreciation for this important subject if their teachers aren’t exactly pulling their weight?

Here are a few trusty methods and ideas to do just that.

1. Make It Tailored – Embrace Diverse Educational Tools

During different periods of our country’s history, the education system (or whatever may have been in place instead at the time) looked vastly different. Varying subjects, teaching methods, types of tests or requirements, and philosophies of learning came into play. We can take a lesson from this reality.

Kids all have different natural interests, skill sets, and learning styles. Some of them enjoy learning about particular names and dates and can remember these pieces of data easily. Others struggle to remember these technical details but thrive on narrative and story.

Thankfully, the study of history includes both and more. If your children are struggling with how the subject of history is being presented to them, it might be that they would fare much better if it was simply presented in a different form.

2. Make It Real – Experience Over Book Knowledge

If it is difficult for your kids to engage with history out of a book or in a classroom, they’re not the only ones. Thankfully, history is alive, real, dynamic, and evidenced all around us. No matter where you live in the country, you likely have access to historically relevant resources and activities if you do a little digging. You likely live within an accessible distance of war memorials, historical buildings and structures, significant places, and peoples, or all of the above.

And on top of these kinds of resources, other helpful real-world teaching aids exist as well. Historical museums can make incredibly impactful and educational experiences. Government buildings, libraries, and other facilities also often have interesting exhibits and educational attractions available that can help bring history to life for your kids. You won’t know unless you do a little searching. Visiting real-life historical places or attractions can help your children (and yourself!) understand, enjoy, and appreciate history in an entirely new way.

3. Make It Personal – Study Relevant Historical Themes

Studying history is like delving into a virtually limitless reservoir of experience, learning, and knowledge. It is chock full of valuable information and relatable content – and much of the most relatable stuff is “off the beaten trail.”

The conventional placeholders, periods, narratives, and themes are all important. However, history can become much more alive when it also includes people or stories that are similar to our own experiences. If you have daughters, why not look at a period in history through a woman’s perspective to understand the women’s suffrage movement.

If you have kids that have particular interests, why not learn the history of that hobby or area? The more you can help make history for your kids, the more likely it is for them to become (and stay) interested.

4. Make It Matter – Connect It to Their Lives

Finally, history can seem very separate from our day-to-day existence if it always stays in dusty textbooks or behind glass. A tragic misconception about the subject of history is that it is only relevant when we look backward to understand our past.

However, history plays a present, active, and forward-focused role in our lives today. Only by understanding where we came from and what has already happened in our story will we be able to anticipate change, make good decisions, and forge ahead into a better future.

To help make history relevant for your kids, take any chance you can to make connections between the historical concept at hand and the way it affects the present day (and, if possible, the ways it can help them better understand their own paths as well as potentially affect their personal futures).

Understanding how governments were formed, the history of currency, how colleges got their start, or how the industries they might be interested in working in one day developed can help them make better choices and better navigate their own personal journeys.

History is full of interest, entertainment, wisdom, and value. Helping your children enjoy history can help them better understand the world around them and make better use of a treasure trove of information and insight that can help them navigate it.