Teaching Strategies to Make History Alive

One important teaching strategy for teaching history is using hands-on activities.

"Using hands-on activities can add interest and meaning to lessons because students are engaged in visually and kinesthetically with hands on materials (like artifact bags). Hands-on activities make a lesson more concrete and meaningful, especially for learners who are less skilled with abstract ideas. They can promote critical thinking skills as the students observe, speculate, and interpret. Using artifacts as part of a hands-on activity can add experiences with another kind of primary source to the student's study of history" (Chapter 12, Section 10). Incorporating artifacts into the lesson is a great tactic when using this hands-on activities teaching strategy.

Here is a link that shows 15 ways to make elementary social studies lessons more exciting: https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/social-studies/

Other strategies include:

Body Sculpting

Role playing

EPIC Strategy

Local History

What Am I

Mysteries in History

Learning about all of these teaching strategies really puts a positive aspect to teaching social studies. Even though not every student enjoys social studies, they can become more engaged through strategies like these. If strategies like these are constantly used, students will learn to enjoy learning social studies material. To make students engaged, you have to relate the strategies to them. Putting their own opinions into certain activities makes a lesson all the better!
During fieldwork, you could tell that some of the students didn't necessarily enjoy learning about social studies. The only way to keep them engaged was to provide activities that every student will enjoy and become interested in. Standing in front of the classroom is not the proper strategy to use. Having students work together and build off of each other's knowledge was the proper way for us to enhance the students knowledge. Me and the rest of the teachers all used hands-on activities which really engaged all of the students. We also incorporated role playing a little bit into our cooperative learning lessons. You read about all of these strategies and keep them in the back of your mind when creating a lesson. Once you come up with good ideas, incorporating these strategies to make history come alive is a great way to engage all students and really get them interested in learning more!!