Hi everyone! We’re getting ready for a new school year here in our household and one of the areas I’m most concerned with is history. I’ve been hesitant to use traditional history books with our children so far, because many of them choose to ignore or downplay important events. I’m not interested in teaching our children fairy tales disguised as history nor am I interested in teaching them a version that conveniently glosses over unflattering truths. As a result, putting together an honest, all-inclusive history curriculum is an ongoing project of mine.
Of course, if I were to wait until I finished this before I taught history to my kids, we’d never get started. So this year, we’re going to begin a project called “The Living History Series”, because one good way to learn history is to start by examining the lives of notable figures. As we sat down to talk about this, Jay and I realized that there were individuals that we didn’t know much about either and those are the people we’re starting with.
Our Living History figure for August is Nelson Mandela.
I’m currently reading his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom” and we’re going to read the children’s version with our kids. I also grabbed several great online resources to put together a lesson plan and I’ve included the links below:
Kid World Citizen – Nelson Mandela Autobiography
BBC – Famous People: Nelson Mandela
MacMillan – Teacher’s Guide: Long Walk to Freedom
Oxfam Education – Nelson Mandela
PBS Frontline – Viewer’s and Teacher’s Guide: Nelson Mandela
Stop back by on August 29 to see what we learned about Nelson Mandela this month!
I agree with you! I have just had the children read the books but I haven’t went the extra step to extend the learning opportunties. I look forward to going through this at the same time. This series will help others.
This also gives me the kick to post other things that I have made.
Yay! I’d love to hear about your projects as well!
Love this idea as I have the same thoughts on history, even though I am using one of the more popular programs! Looking forward to follow along with this 🙂
Thanks for stopping by, Kylie! 🙂
Selena just found your site and I was looking for children books about Nelson Mandela and I got one my boys (5, 3, 1) sure had a tough time getting into it. Thanks for sharing. I wanted my boys to grow up knowing how things really were for folks in S Africa. My kids loves to get picture books with people in there that looks like them, and when they see someone in a book that looks like them they say “Look Mommy, they are brown like me.” I look forward to seeing who you will be studying in September.
We are a military family in England and I look forward to following your blog.
Speak soon!
Nicole
That’s great! We absolutely need to see more people of color in children’s books and we’ll be highlighting some books like that this year. Thanks so much for visiting!