Course Sample for Our Stepping Through History: Starting with You Homeschool Social Studies Course

To view a full sample of this course, click here.

Lesson One
What Is History?

(Note to Parents: Please give your child time to answer all the questions and discuss these ideas out loud as you are reading. You will need either a spiral notebook, a composition book, or a notebook to keep your student’s projects in, so they can have their own little history book at the end of the year.)

History starts with what you did five minutes ago. So to begin our studies, you have to help us get started. What did you do this morning? Did you make your bed? Did you eat breakfast? Did you get dressed? What are you wearing today?

You have just told the story of your morning. History is full of stories from many people and many places. I am going to tell you some stories in this class. They will be from longer ago than this morning, but we will go back just a little at a time, to help your imagination grow.

Do you know what imagination is? Imagination is when you make or change a picture in your mind. Have you ever imagined that a cloud looked like a pancake or a dog? Or maybe it was your pancake that looked like a cloud! Using your imagination can be very fun, and it is important in history. To understand times before we were born we have to use our imagination, because the world was a little bit different that long ago. But before we can imagine what it was like, we need information. We need to know just which things were different and what life was like way back then, before we can make a nice beautiful, bright, and colorful picture of those times in our imaginations.

Your first assignment is to be an investigator, someone who asks questions in order to gather information. I want you to ask your mom and/or dad how many things are in your house that they did not have in their houses when they were the same age as you. You might be surprised to find how different the world was when they were little girls and boys. Or maybe you will be surprised to find out that only a few things have changed since they were little. We will talk more about when your parents were kids in a few weeks.

Now I have one more assignment for you to do to finish this lesson. You are going to make a book. Does that sound hard? Don’t worry. We will only work on one page at a time, just a few pages each week. When you are done, you will be able to tell the story of history from the day you were born, all the way back to the day when the first light bulbs were manufactured and the first telephone call was made. Of course, that is a very long time ago—more than a hundred years! Your book will help you remember all of the things that happened in between the light bulb and you!

On the inside cover of your notebook you will glue the Pledge of Allegiance. This is a special promise we make to our flag and country. Many children all over the country say this pledge when they begin their school day.

More About Our Stepping Through History: Starting with You Homeschool Social Studies Course

This Stepping Through History: Starting with You homeschool social studies course is meant to fill a gap lesson designer Marla Szwast found when attempting to teach her young children history. She wanted to start with now. After all, the child knows now and has a concept of what it is like to live in this year. She was rather disappointed in the number of resources available to teach young children modern history. So Mrs. Szwast pieced together what she could but had to start around WWII, because she simply could not find any developmentally appropriate resources for more recent times. She did this until some of her children were old enough that they asked to study history forward. Mrs. Szwast taught them by reading aloud, since they study history as a family. Because a four-year history cycle sounded too slow to her, they did world history, ancient to modern, in one year. She read history books she loved and quit reading a few she hated. Over time, Mrs. Szwast developed a real vision for what she had wanted back when her first children were in early elementary and forged ahead to create it in this Stepping Through History: Starting with You homeschool social studies course.

History can be exciting and fun; after all, it is full of great stories. But what makes it relevant and real? How do young children begin to sort out the fantastic tales of fiction and the real histories of the world which often seem just as fantastic? They must begin in a place where it really does exist for them. In the Stepping Through History: Starting with You homeschool social studies course, children move from themselves to the events in their parents’ childhoods, then their grandparents, etc. The elementary homeschool student builds a family tree and also discovers that things in history happened in different places.

Mrs. Szwast’s educational philosophy is to teach from the known to the unknown. She attempts to paint a picture in the child’s mind of what each decade was like. How was it the same as the decades around it? How was it unique? Stepping Through History: Starting with You lessons utilize all learning pathways — auditory as the child listens to the parent read the text, visual pictures, and the kinesthetic work of making their own history book. The homeschool social studies lessons are designed to be covered one per week and can be spread across different days or covered in one day, depending on the student and the homeschool parent’s teaching style.

It is highly recommended that after the elementary homeschool child puts together notebook pages for the day that the parent asks the child to narrate, or tell the story of each item added to the notebook. Also encourage the student to show their notebook to someone else at the end of each week (perhaps Dad) and to tell about what they learned. This will help the child retain what was learned. It would also be excellent to periodically open to a random page at the beginning of the lesson and ask the child to tell what they remember about that lesson before starting a new one.

Stepping Through History: Starting with You homeschool social studies lessons were designed with a second grader in mind, although they can easily be adapted to teach any early elementary level and may be used for a group study of modern history. Photos of sample notebooking pages are included. These have been completed by a second grader, one of Mrs. Szwast’s children. The goal here is not a perfectly beautiful notebook; it is depth of understanding, love of learning the stories of history, and the excitement young children always seem to have for creating something of their own.