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.