Early American History Lessons Through Story
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For five years, after raising eight children, my grandparents relocated to Germany and traveled all over Europe and beyond. During this time, my grandma kept a verbose journal with reams of paper and a typewriter. I digitized her journal, and in the end, it was over 100,000 words. This tells the story not only of their travels but it is a piece of our family history. Grandbabies were born, people got married, the loss of one of their children still haunted them. What a gift this is to our entire family - to be able to hear our story from the matriarch! Now imagine if all we heard of this time in our family history was through my Grandpa. We would be missing a rich and relevant perspective! This is what happens to history when we don’t prioritize the representation of cultures, colors, and genders in the ever-evolving human story.
I don’t know about you, but I want to hear the whole story.
Living Books Teach Through Story
In our homeschool, we prioritize the use of story as a teaching tool. We can learn through story in pretty much any subject! But there is no better way to learn history than through story and biographies. Beautiful Feet Books has an Early American Enrichment Pack that caught my eye to add to our studies of early America not only because they are beautifully written, but they are vitally important voices to include as we learn the hard history of our country. It isn’t a glamorous story, though we might think so if we only read from the perspectives of the founders and conquerers. Like hearing my family history through my Grandmother, I want to hear the history of our country through a whole tapestry of voices.
When I opened up Voices of Her Own, I was sitting alone and the kids were asleep. My eyes welled up with tears three times as I read through it, wishing I had known her story earlier. Wishing I had read the poems of Phillis Wheatley as part of my own history education. Realizing it’s not too late - I went online and found her original poetry to read that for myself. The sign of a living book is when it sparks something within you, an idea or desire to learn even more.
Living history books connect us straight to the heart of the people in history, beyond the dates on a timeline. The date isn’t really so important, the person is what’s important. I love that Beautiful Feet Books focuses on the heart of what matters in history by selecting stories that matter and tell the story well.
Making Connections Through Charlotte Mason Style Lessons
The teacher’s guide that comes with the Early American Enrichment Pack is not a checklist of tasks and activities - and that’s a good thing. These stories are meant to be experienced and felt and explored. After a summary of the book, the guide offers topics to discuss and question prompts to guide the discussion as well as some topics to go and explore further on your own. There are also a few small black and white pictures the children can cut out and color and add to their notebooks.
With a study like this, I like to explore the books freely and use the guide loosely as a way to spark me with a few ideas of things to ask my girls as we talk about the book. Our lesson flows like this:
We read aloud together, they narrate the story or sometimes we will even act it out together. We might even wait and narrate the story the following day. I prompt them with how the story began.
We select a sentence from the story to use as copywork and they write it into notebooks. Then either later that day or the following day, they’ll add an illustration to the copywork page with something they remember from the story.
The discussion questions, for us, are best used naturally within our conversation about the story. Usually, the questions asked by the children are more important than anything I could ask them. I highly encourage their questions!
We review the notebooks by looking back over them here and there, as you would look back over a book of memories. It’s amazing how these drawings and quotes prompt their memory of whole stories!
Powerful Stories Leave an Impact
As we read our way through the Early American Enrichment pack, we will experience the stories of a young girl kidnapped and taken as a slave who grew to become the first black poet in America, young Phoebe Fraunces who saved George Washington’s life, the first black scientist Benjamin Banneker who challenged Thomas Jefferson about the inhumanity of slavery, a haunting beautiful story of a young Choctaw girl helping and an enslaved boy and his family flee across a river, the Cherokee man Sequoyah who created a system of writing, the story of Harriet Tubman leading over 300 enslaved people to freedom, the story of Arturo Schomburg’s quest to dedicate a library to black heritage, the story of the struggle to have a voice and vote as Fannie Lou Hamer fought for voting rights during the Civil Rights Movement, and a compilation of ten more powerful women who changed American history.
I want the little students of my homeschool to go out into the world with empathy and awareness of our interconnectedness. I truly believe that learning history through powerful, personal stories reaches their hearts in a way most lessons just can’t. Living books will make them wonder how they can learn more about that person, that place and time in history, and who they will be in the great story of humanity.
Visit Beautiful Feet Books to explore the many beautiful literature collections they curate to help you teach your children through story.
Beautiful Feet Books is offering a free downloadable guide to coach you through selecting quality living books to read to your children!
