Teaching History Concepts in Early Childhood
Difficulty Teaching Social Sciences Early
Initial premise: The concept of time and History can be taught and learned in Early Childhood Education.
Traditional Views in Spain
Traditionally, teachers in Spain have tended to think that it is only possible to teach history in the third cycle of primary education (Hernandez, 2000; Santisteban, 2000). Social sciences were not taught at the initial level because educators thought that the children were too young to understand their contents, characterized by a high level of abstraction.
Empirical Evidence Countering Views
But, numerous empirical studies have concluded that children from the age of five have an idea of duration and even a sense of history.
Factors for Successful Teaching
- Learning history and historical time in the stage of early childhood education and elementary courses is more related to the methodologies and strategies that are used for its teaching than the capabilities and the age of the student body.
- Better results can be obtained if we change the teaching methodology, materials, and resources that are usually used.
- Therefore, the problems of its learning are rooted in the selection of content and its didactic treatment, not in age.
Children’s Understanding of Time
From 5 years old, children possess a clear idea of “duration” (life) and even a certain sense of “History.” Children should have learned in the previous stages the following temporal categories: Succession, reversibility, concurrency, continuity, and change.
Procedural Content and Historical Method
With regard to procedural content, Hernández (2000) considered that children can start to study with an historical method.
Familiarization and Classification
Children must familiarize themselves with objects, documents, and diverse remains related to the past. They must identify and classify them.
Justification for Early History Teaching
Santisteban and Pagès (2006) justify the need to teach history at the initial levels for the following reasons:
- In current society, the mass media cause the fragmentation of time.
- There is a loss of the sense of temporal depth and of the relations between generations.
- History helps children to comprehend all the historical modalities outside the classroom: museums, movies, theater, literature, centers of interpretation of patrimony, etc.
- It is necessary to develop in pupils a historical thought that helps them to be located in the present.
Cooper’s Proposed Lines of Action
Finally, we will discuss the observations of Cooper (2002, 2006), who proposes three lines of action to develop teaching for children (from three to eight years):
- Understanding the concepts of time and change: We work with the concept of time and change in the lives of the children. We use narrations and biographies nearby and distant in time. Also, we reconstruct events from the past…
- Interpreting the past through storytelling and the drafting of stories: The way for this is to elaborate hypotheses on historical facts, interpretations of illustrations, the reconstruction of stories through games, oral history, dramatization, etc.
- Deriving and inferring from historical sources: This is done through activities such as riddles on sources, sequencing of sources, etc.