Creative History Lessons
Ideas for Teaching your Children about Famous People from History
Using creative ideas to teach history will enable students to enjoy their lessons and help them learn more. Some ideas include using money, writing a biography, writing and acting out a play, and putting together a scrapbook.
Teaching Lessons with Money
One idea is to have your children put together a money album. Find a picture of each piece of money (bill or coin) to print out first. Then do some research on the person whose picture is on the money piece. Find facts and events relating to the person and write a report or make a list in the album. Challenge the children to come up with unique facts and important lessons to include in their album.
As a reward, they may even possibly earn that particular coin or dollar bill up to a certain point. Giving your child a $100 dollar bill for writing a report on Benjamin Franklin may not be a good idea, but giving them a quarter for doing a report on George Washington may be doable.
Writing a Biography
Have your children write and illustrate a short biography on a person's life. Have them include fun antidotes about the person’s childhood or wacky facts that they can find out about the person as well as the important lessons and events that person was involved in. Make sure that they illustrate their biography as well, picking the most important things in the biography to draw a picture of.
Star in a Drama
If you have more than one child, or a classroom of students, have them work together to put on a dramatic play on the famous person's life. Have them start by doing researh on the person’s life, and deciding what event is most important to act out.
A list of characters and a script need to be written, and if your children are very ambitious, costumes and props can be created. Assign parts to each child and hold rehearsals before bringing in an audience for the children to perform in front of.
Scrapbook
If you like to scrapbook, bring that skill to the classroom with your children and students by having them put together a small scrapbook of someone else’s life. This is a great chance to teach research skills, internet skills and use their creativity to put together what they learn. This is also a great piece of work to put into a portfolio.
Children need to learn that history can be interesting and relavent to their lives. Use these ideas and come up with your own to make learning history more enjoyable and maybe even a little fun!
