Political and Historical Concepts for Elementary Students
Understanding Political Concepts for Elementary Students
Although most human activity is governed by political decisions, knowledge of how more complex and seems to be reached later than other economic or social skills.
The performances of the students are (Connel):
- Up to 6, are dominated by fantasy. Political facts are mixed with non-politicians. They have heard of various political figures, but do not know their role. No laws differ from other rules confined to family or school areas.
- 7-9 shows the idea of the head in school settings, work, and society. Before 10 years, students are not able to explain what countries, states, or nations are.
- 10-12 are able to identify the functions of government represented by the various political institutions. Laws are made by parliament (prohibitive and establish rights.)
- 13-16 reach understanding of the ideological thinking political order as a living space groups and organizations with different interests and conflicting.
Aspects that affect the evolution of the understanding of political concepts:
- Provide opportunities to participate in meaningful social and political experiences.
- Provide explicit information on the institutions.
Historical Understanding of Time for Elementary Students
The realization that temporary learning difficulties and have little time in the minds of the students led the research on how the understanding of time develops in children and adolescents.
Piaget’s studies were based on the premise that understanding and interpretation of historical time is fundamentally a cognitive process that derives from the age of the students, eventually concluding that until adolescence (14-16 years) students have no sense of time in general and time. Therefore, his teaching discouraged before age 14.
These ideas were reviewed by other research based on different budgets:
- That children from birth temporal notions are unfolding through personal experiences and through the capacity for imagination and storytelling.
- The process of teaching the concepts of time can not be carried out independently of the events and the concrete historical processes.
- The acquisition of temporal notions depends more on classroom content and teaching methods to be used than assumptions about universal stages.
Antonio Calvani’s research insists that the difficulties in understanding the history and time are not so much the lack of psychological capacities of children and the poor selection of content. Calvani argues that children arrive at nursery school primary and a sense of temporality removed from the events of everyday life, through stories, real or imaginary.
Kieran Egan: Children always learn from concrete to abstract, from simple to complex. Defend the role they play in learning imagination and fantasy to make sense of historical time from accounts of historical content.
These new research suggests that:
- 3-5 are capable to execute sequences of events that are related to family history or with its immediate environment.
- 6-8 begin to handle the historical numbers to represent a very remote past. They can also begin to identify changes and continuities in familiar surroundings.
- 9-11 can manage events and historical periods that are meaningful.
- Time periods from 1912 to 1914 can be developed using terms such as decade or century and locate relevant historical events, great periodization of history.