Historical Events Affects The Cultural Mindsets Of Children Chapter 3 Summary

2064 Words9 Pages

Chapter Three: Chapter three will address how teaching different historical perspectives and events affects the cultural mindsets of young children. This chapter will also give different examples on how to teach various historical perspectives and events to young elementary students, including topics that may be especially sensitive for some of the diverse groups of students. The US and the rest of the world is constantly changing. Every day it seems there is something going on in the world that affects one country or another. These changes are “creating new multi-ethnic, multiracial, multi-lingual, multi-religious, and multicultural context for elementary education (NCSS, pg 1). The purpose of learning about social studies in elementary …show more content…

Some examples of ways to teach history to students is to keep them involved. The NCSS recommends techniques such as holding debates, small group and class discussions, projects, and simulations (pg 2). All these examples require students to apply their critical thinking skills and develop them further. By teaching different historical perspectives and events, you are helping to change the mindsets of young children in a healthy and beneficial way. According to M. Donovan and John Bransford, there are six ideas, or concepts, that teachers need to cover when they are teaching a history class that can help give the students a better sense of what history is all about (pg 41). The first concept is time. As previously stated, history is constantly changing over time. New materials, ideas, concepts, and events are get added to our textbooks and our curricula is always changing and adapting. Time allows students to organize dates and events into an order that makes the topic easier to understand (Donovan & Bransford, pg 43). It can be especially difficult for younger elementary students to comprehend the concept of time so it is important for the teacher to spend a quality amount of class time learning about the concept of time, chronological order …show more content…

Evidence is one of the most important aspects needed to understand the discipline of history. Without evidence, we wouldn't know why or even if things or events actually happened. Young students have the tendency to believe that history is just something that was already known. Their young minds are still learning about the concept of time and are not always able to comprehend how things came to be before their time. What is often done by elementary students who are researching a particular subject is that they will There are some issues however, that come with gaining evidence to understand the discipline of history. One of them is the unrealized amount of influence our personal biases have on certain topics. Another issue is common sense. Commons sense helps persuade our mind and thought to go a certain way, whether it's correct or not (Donovan & Bransford, pg 55). An important thing to teach young students about history is that accounts may change as events, memories, and recollections are recalled from people's primary and secondary sources. It is essential for teachers to encourage their students to not just assume something is true because someone said it so but to look deeper and examine more closely the historical topics that are being discussed and learned about. This concept can also be difficult to explain to students of diverse backgrounds because it all depends on