Make History Come Alive! 7 Homeschooling Tips from Professor Schweikart

Homeschooling Tips for Engaging History Lessons

After three decades of teaching college students, I've distilled my expertise into practical homeschooling tips designed to engage young minds and build a strong foundation in history.

A Teacher's Journey: Practical Homeschooling Advice

At some point, every teacher, including myself, had to, for the first time, stand up in front of a class and, well, teach. I was hired in my first job to teach 7th-grade reading to a school of primarily migrant cotton-picker children. Some didn’t know much English. Most—in 7th grade—could only read at the 2nd-grade level when I gave them the test. So, as the Marines say, “Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome!”

Since I knew the readers wouldn’t work, I brought my stash of comic books from home. THOSE worked. I’m not saying they immediately became role models for reading comprehension, but I could tell by the sophistication of the comics they were getting it.

My next job was teaching Western Civilization to high schoolers at an elite prep school. Before, my task was to teach down to a level they could get, but now I had top-tier students who knew if I misspelled a word. And the first day at that job was just as stressful as the first day in the reading class.

What did I learn?

1. Embrace Mistakes as Learning Opportunities

When it’s all said and done, YOU are the teacher. Unless your child/student is an absolute savant, 99 times out of 100, you will know far more than he or she does. Therefore, be bold. Don’t approach instruction with the attitude of “Gee, what if I make a mistake? Will my son or daughter think less of me?” Instead, approach it with the mindset that you WILL make mistakes. But when you do and learn about it, you admit it. “Gosh, you know we talked about Napoleon yesterday, and I repeated something I heard was just wrong—he really wasn’t short. He was of average size for a French man! I guess that’s why we keep reading and keep researching.”

As long as you remember that you are the teacher and that while you can be wrong, you still are the teacher, you’ll be fine.

2. Turn Errors into Teachable Moments

Errors are teachable moments. Let’s go back to our Napoleon example.

“Wow, why did I automatically assume he was short, do you suppose? Do you think I got my information from a bad source? Or worse, did I just go with what “they all say?” Use errors as a method of quality control. “Why did you make this particular mistake? Did you look at all sides and consult other sources? Why did you trust particular sources?”

When writing a 1,000-page history book (A Patriot’s History of the United States) with a coauthor, we both reviewed the manuscript numerous times. Then, our agent read it. Then our editor read it. Then a copy editor read it. Then we all read the proofs another time!

Guess what? There were still errors in it.

I recall one reviewer saying, “An excellent book, but not without its flaws.” I said WHAAAAT?? I got his email and asked him, “What flaws?” He told me. He was right. I said, “If I paid you, would you do a thorough scrub of the whole book and tell me about any other errors you find? Sure enough, he gave me a report of 18 pages! Now, thank God, they weren’t all errors—much was a disagreement over interpretations that we discussed. But even to this day . . . FORTY ONE PRINTINGS LATER . . . I still find occasional misspellings. Expect that you will make mistakes and develop techniques for using them to improve your student’s learning.

3. Making Informed Choices: Effective Homeschooling Tips

When it comes to history, there is no such thing as “just a fact.” If you tried to write a history of almost any subject just on facts, you would hit a brick wall because, within minutes, you’d say, “Wait! Why am I using this fact over that fact?”

What I’m saying is that the very selection of one fact over another requires a value judgment. Why include the tales of this group but not that one? The answer is usually pretty simple. In anything we do, we have to make judgments about the significance of what we are studying and teaching. For example, “social history” is a giant sub-field now—that is, the study of the lives of ordinary people. But this has a problem. With a few variations of climate, religion, or period, most people are the same over time. They love, hate, seek romance, fight wars, etc. While it is interesting to dive into their different clothes or eating habits, for the most part, humans are the same. What is significant? Leaders. Whether in business or art or politics or economics, those special people who stand out change the lives of everyone else, NOT VICE VERSA.

All of Andrew Carnegie’s employees combined were not as significant as Andrew Carnegie in the historical context. I’m not saying they weren’t valuable as individuals, but that U.S. Steel would still have been here without them, but not without Carnegie.

The point is that when teaching history, there is no such thing as “unbiased.” You are only doing your best to make sure you’ve told the truest story you can about the most significant people and events.

4. Bring History to Life: Connecting the Past to the Present

Don’t quit til you reach the end. How many of you had a history teacher who would get up to the last 20 years of when you were taking the course and just assume you knew the rest because you lived it? Right. You lived in your little, tiny corner of the world. But the purpose of history education is, again, to teach you significance. Was your corner of the world in the thick of things, or was it a remote outpost that really played no role in affecting the lives of most people?

Do everything you can to get your course up to the present. If it means leaving out a few things from the past, so be it.

5. Nurture a Love of Reading: Essential Homeschooling Tips

If you want to have a student that writes, have a student that reads. No writer worth his salt ever avoided reading others. The best way to become a good writer is to learn word tricks, style changes, different sentence structures, and so on from excellent writers. And they don’t all have to be non-fiction writers.

6. Discover Your Unique Teaching Style

Even if something isn’t particularly in your teaching bag, if it works for the student, use it. In high school, I was horrible at math. I had a really cute teacher who was also my tutor, so I think I was distracted from equations. However, I managed a C- or a D, but when I got to college, I had to take a math course. That terrified me. I barely got through high school math. But the instructor I had used gambling scenarios—which was strange because I did not gamble, but it did make total sense. I got an A.

Many of these methods you may come across by accident. But when you find things that work, don’t worry that they “aren’t in the manual” or aren’t typical teaching techniques. If they work, use them. You’ll find that if you excite the student about learning—however it takes place—he or she will eventually want to know how to “do it right.”

7. Experiment and Innovate: Creative Homeschooling Tips

Mix it up. Use as many different techniques as you can—unless, of course, you find your student really hates one of them. In my college classes, I always mixed in a video with a lecture and discussion. I did not have good success with small groups, but others did. Videos, music from different periods, architecture, field trips, models—any of these can supplement reading and writing. Remember, these are homeschooling tips, and flexibility is key.

These should help you get out of the gate. Now go get’em.

Empower Your Homeschool Journey: Additional Resources

These homeschooling tips have provided a solid foundation for your history curriculum. To further enhance your child's learning experience, consider exploring additional resources and support.

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