Teaching Your Big Kid About Independence Day and the Importance of History

Here are more tips on how to teach history to your child.

2. Watch some historical films together. According to Sam Wineburg, Professor of Educational Psychology and Adjunct Professor of History, University of Washington, Seattle, and the author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple, 2001), kids nowadays learn more from multimedia like the movie Forrest Gump than from actual textbooks. Of course, the key is to make sure you choose material that is, more or less, historically accurate. Some examples are Jose Rizal, Rizal sa Dapitan and Baler. Visit this link for top ten Filipino historical films

3. Make a game out of a historical account. Try getting firsthand documents that describe a historical period of the Philippines and make it into a game (for example, make a list of top 10 things that they observed about Magellan landing in the Philippines). According to Robert Cook , an American historian, both kids and adults are fascinated by lists of the ten best or the ten worst things.

Don’t let the opportunity of teaching your kids about Philippine history pass you by. Now is the time to introduce the concept of history and the importance of learning from the past to your big kid.

Photos: flag, Dekada '70