Tell A Story

I’m a storyteller. I have been all my life. I have been told that I’m dramatic, animated, passionate, excited. My favorite is when I’m told to calm down. Yeah, that never works. I just get more excited. Anyone else?

Well because I am a storyteller, I loved it when school lessons came with a story. I didn’t realize I liked stories that related to my learning until I started homeschooling and the first subject I noticed was missing stories was history. When my oldest was in 4th grade we were using Abeka at the time. Abeka was very date and timeline heavy. There is nothing wrong with that, but rote memory work can certainly be boring. Needless to say, 4th grade history was tough for both my son and me. If I was bored with quizzing him on rote memory work, I knew he was bored. However, since this was the traditional way that I learned history, I didn’t know there was a better way until I started researching and discovering other curriculum and resources that were available.The best example I have seen of rote memory work made fun is Classical Conversations Foundations in which they put a timeline of history to a song from the beginning of history to current day.

So, what did we do? I found a curriculum that had a combination of both, and I found books that told stories about the timeframe of history we were in. When we studied the civil war and Gettysburg, we read Killer Angels. We also visited the battlefield and read all the signs and studied the cyclorama in the visitors center. But it wasn’t until I read a story, actually a compilation of journal entries found from the historical characters that participated in the event, that the battlefield came alive and I understood the battle. I could see it in my mind's eye. I could remember the dates. I knew the characters, I understood their thoughts, fears, and reasoning. I was there with them. I agonized with them. I grieved with them. I was a part of the story. Some may think that the book is too complicated – it’s too hard to read. I’ll leave that up to you, but my kids read it when they were 13.  

Once the timeline comes alive with stories, it is no longer just a linear line with a bunch of seemingly random dates. It becomes a series of stories and organizing the dates no longer is difficult because you aren’t organizing dates you are organizing stories. History comes alive.

Storytelling is true across the subject strands. Science comes alive when you study the stories of the scientists, experiments and discoveries. Notice, I didn’t say facts. I said stories. Language and grammar are the bones of a story. Even math tells a story of order in a world of chaos. Every subject has a story.