6 Ways to Make History More Fun for Kids

So your child thinks history is boring...no surprise there! But what may surprise you is how easily you can turn history into a fun and exciting subject for kids. Here are six ways to make history come to life, even for reluctant learners.

So how do parents help their bored or disinterested kid engage with history beyond a page in a textbook? Sarah Clark, a curator at the Staten Island Historical Society, knows the struggles from teaching her own children about history. “My kids loved to read, and they were enchanted by museum visits when they could see real things that they know about from the books they had read,” Clark says. “I think it’s great to connect museum trips with reading—whether fiction, nonfiction, or even fairy tales.”Waterloo. Amerigo Vespucci. The Alamo. Hitler. The Constitution. The Manhattan Project. The Spanish Inquisition. 1492. 1776. 1789. 1941. 1969. Your child might memorize such historical data by rote for a test, but what value does it really have in the long run if not couched in context? Unless he has a vested interest in the overall timeline and impetus of the event, chances are such an approach to history will put your child to sleep, and fast. The key to learning things by heart—and taking their meaning to heart—is engagement. “If you’re really engaged, memory comes pretty automatically,” says Daniel Willingham, Ph.D., author of Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

Here, a few more enticing and easy ways to bring history to life for young students.

Join a book club.

Historic Richmond Town on Staten Island has an after-school book club and story museum program for preschoolers. During the program, an educator chooses exciting books that bring history to life. Children who are old enough to choose and read historical stories themselves do. Otherwise, stories are read to them. All books are available from the New York Public Library, which helps keep costs down. According to Clark, “both programs are great for involving children and families in history.”

For parents who want to help their kids start or join a book club, Clark suggests paying attention to their children’s particular interests. “Let them freely choose what areas of history to explore,” says Clark, whose daughter always loved dress-up and began exploring history with coloring books and paper dolls from the Museum Store at Historic Richmond Town. Later, she read Dover Children’s Thrift Classics books, and eventually progressed to the full literary works. The architecture and antiques of the museum connected her to some of the worlds that she was reading about. As a college student, she was lucky enough to study the works of Jane Austen in Bath, England. “If you can find real-world places, objects, or manuscripts to make the history come alive, then children can have experiences that they’ll never forget. You never know where books can take you!”

Help children trace their roots.

One of the best ways to engage children in history is by tracing their own family roots, says Peter “Souleo” Wright, an independent curator for the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. “Children are instinctively curious and inquisitive about their immediate family,” Wright says. “Therefore this is the perfect opportunity to explore questions they may have about their lineage. This is also a great way to make larger historical issues more powerful by connecting them to personal experiences.”

If children discover that they are descendants of slaves, for instance, this can open up a conversation about the history of slavery and the achievements of people such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. Perhaps they discover that a distant relative fought in the Civil War, or volunteered with wounded soldiers returning from overseas during one of the World Wars. Did a female descendant run for government? Every nugget is worth exploring and weaving a story around—helping your child paint of picture of their descendants’ milieu will in turn help them open doors of understanding to history.

Living in the New York area has its advantages, too: A trip to Ellis Island to help children learn about the past is a close one. To prime children for visits, parents should begin to discuss where their children’s grandparents and great grandparents came from by flipping through family pictures. If there are photos of families enjoying traditional meals, that helps parents discuss their ethnicity.

“For children, it may be as simple as starting discussions about why your families eat certain meals or cookies around the holidays. Parents can explain that their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents made those meals first,” says Peg Zitko, the senior vice president of public affairs at the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. “Little kids can have a hard time comprehending that they are descended from a long lineage. They don’t think beyond the people they know.”

During their visit to Ellis Island, children can use the American Immigration Family History Center database to search the museum’s records, which include ship manifest records from 1890 to 1924. By including the names of the relatives you’re searching for as well as their nationality, possible years of arrival, and any family members they might have been traveling with, the database can assist in finding information about the traveler—such as his or her occupation or if the person traveled to the United States multiple times before his or her final trip (men frequently did this to work in America before taking money home), or whether there are other more distant relatives one might find.

If your family has difficulty finding information from the suggestions above, there’s still hope, Zitko says. By the end of the year, the American Immigration Family History Center will soon have access to records from roughly 1820 to 1957.

Choose favorite time periods.

Children (adults, too) have always been fascinated with Egypt, says Bob Brier, a senior research fellow at Long Island University/LIU Post in Brookville. The biggest draw from this popular period—no surprise—is mummies. “When you see children in a mummy exhibit, they’ll stay there as long as you let them,” Brier says. “People don’t talk about death with children. Ask any museum curator, and they’ll tell you the same thing. Children beeline for mummy exhibits. It’s a rare chance for children to look at a dead person, and it fascinates them.”

Brier co-authored the middle-grade book Ancient Egypt: Everyday Life in the Land of the Nile (Sterling), one title in the “Everyday Life” series exploring the day-to-day lives of ancient cultures. If your child isn’t quite so fascinated by pyramids and mummies, the highly readable and captivating series also explores ancient Greece, the Viking age, and the Middle Ages (think Knights of the Roundtable and Arthurian legend in Medieval Europe). If it’s the Revolutionary War era that piques your kid’s interest, why not take a day trip to Boston or Philadelphia to immerse him in the period? By visiting museums, learning about day-to-day life through books such as the “Everyday Life” series, and even watching documentary specials on television, your child just might find an affinity for one particular period which she can explore more deeply.