Home School Heartbeat Radio Program

Has history become dull and boring for your kids? Today Mike Smith talks to homeschool dad and publisher, Rob Shearer, about making history interesting.

Mike:


Rob, it's clear that many people view history as merely dates and dead people. How can parents make history come alive for their children?


Rob:


Mike, I'm convinced that the most important thing we can do to make history interesting for our children is to give them good biographies to read. Most people don't like dates, most people don't like textbooks, and I think for understandable reasons, they are boring. But people love to hear stories about people. People love to read about how individuals made a difference. And if you think about it, this is the way the Bible presents history to us. You know, you don't get little essays on conflicts between the Egyptian and Semitic culture. Instead, you get the stories of people. The focus is always on an individual. You have the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Joshua and the judges and the kings. And God gives us those character sketches; he gives us even the evil and wicked kings because there are lessons that we're supposed to learn by studying them. Biography, I'm convinced, is the thing that grabs our children's imagination; it's the thing that teaches us. It's the way God wants to teach us those important character lessons about the qualities that we're to have in our life and the things that we're to avoid. And we have both good examples and bad examples in those biographies to read. Textbooks can wait till later. When your kids are in the elementary grades, give 'em good biographies to read. That's the way to teach them the lessons that we want them to learn.


Mike:


Well, Rob, thank you for sharing your insights with us this week. And until next time, I'm Mike Smith.