Teaching history in your Christian homeschool setting can be difficult.  Some of the best activities in history class necessitate group learning.  The sheer amount of facts that come into play, especially with the advanced curriculum in history (high school, AP), can be daunting to teacher and student alike.  One of the ways that I have overcome this problem is through the use of narrative.  Historical narrative, or stories, can be extremely instrutive when teaching concepts.  Moreover, it provides a depth of knowledge that purely analytical learning cannot.  This does not necessarily take away from learning dates, facts, and figures, but can help improve your student’s cognition of these more rote items.  Coming into a unit with a good basis of knowledge, using a story to underscore a concept, can be incredibly impactful.  I suggest you give it a try.

I will give one example here.  There was a great story in the Wall Street Journal about the inauguration of President Andrew Jackson.  One of the main themes of this presidency was the ‘Jacksonian democracy’ and the emergence of new people into the democratic process.  This is best expemplified in a narrative format by discussing Jackson’s racous inauguration party that included all members of society, even those rough a tumble type who had stayed away from politics previously.

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One of the most frustrating things for me when I got to the US History part of my Christian homeschool curriculum was the terrible resources available.  The current trajectory of the dicipline of history is left-leaning historians writing revisionist history that goes too far in attacking Christianity’s role in the making of the United States.  I am not looking for a glossy portrayl of the situation, but every single textbook that I picked up was a little over the top in its condemnation or even worse subtle reproach of the role of Christianity in the making of the United States.  I didn’t want an entirely Christian view of the topic either, but something more balanced.  What I learned is that this was largely impossible.  This is one of the frustrating things of teaching Christian homeschool.  I am not looking to indoctrinate my children, but the unfortunately reality is that there are so few balanced curriculum sets for US History out there.  I eventually went with the Alpha Omega Curriculum
edition, just because of my luck with their works in other areas.  I cannot say that I was disappointed, but the whole experience made me want to develop my own history curriculum for Christian homeschools that provided a nice balanced approach.

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