History Homework
It is easy to get your priorities wrong when you are teaching history to elementary or secondary students. Because history calls for students to learn large amounts of details about events that are perhaps long ago in the past, it is easy for teachers to assign homework that calls for their students to dwell in dates, names and other history "trivia" that misses the mark on what you really want to do when you teach history to young people.
Before you compile your homework curriculum for the semester of work you are going to accomplish teaching history to young people, think about what you really want to achieve with the time you have with these kids. Yes it is good to get the facts about an era in history passed along to the students. But to start with the details without thinking about the higher level goal of any history class misses the mark.
What you really are trying to accomplish is to instill a love of history and a fascination with all eras of history into your students. If you can help this group of kids become passionate about history and begin to see this part of their academics as important and relevant, the dates, names and events will fall into place. So use the resource of homework to accomplish the two goals of helping them learn the nuts and bolts of history but also of helping them develop that love of the subject which makes you enjoy teaching history so much.
We live in an era where there has never been so much access to history. By paying attention to the various history channels on television, you can often find a show that covers the era or topic material you want your students to study being shown during the semester. These shows are professionally produced to be both historically rich in detail and accurate and very entertaining. What student would not love it if the teacher gave them an assignment to watch television for their homework?
Relevancy is the biggest issue when it comes to trying to engage young people in the study of history. That difficult questions of "why does this matter?" is a tough one when studying some historical event that may be too long ago to have any real meaning even to the parents or grandparents of the kids. A sharp teacher will look for current events that are engaging and use those events to drill back into history thus attaching the relevance of today's deadlines to historical events.
Presidential elections or even tragic events like 911 can be tied to similar events in history which confer relevance. By looking for ways to make the students care and develop opinions about history, the youngsters will bond with people, places and things in the past and history will come alive. If you mold your homework assignments about history around these concepts, you will have a much greater success in using homework to make the students experience history make sense.