Making Self-Connections Helps Children Learn History

 By Lesley Barker PhD

There are at least three kinds of connections that can be leveraged to assist a child to learn something new: self-connections, world-connections, and book-connections. The most powerful connection to assist the learning process that you can trigger in your child is a self-connection. Before you can use this strategy, however, you have to build the cognitive tasks that underlie this process.  Making connections starts by sorting items into categories. Two year olds can become skilled at making connections when you combine a simple task like picking up the toys with a challenge: pick up all the red toys. Now put away all the toys with wheels. More verbal preschoolers should be able to look at two pictures and distinguish what is the same and what is different. As preschoolers become more verbal and observant, they can be guided to compare and contrast abstract items and ideas. This prepares them to make and talk about specific self-connections. When they are able to have these conversations you can use the strategy to introduce and motivate children to engage with new information. If an older child has difficulty sorting, organizing and differentiating between objects, they can still learn how to do this. It is important. Assign chores like putting away the silverware correctly or folding the socks. Move from these tasks to more nuanced conversations and activities that require these skills. Making self-connections starts with the ability to see similarities between the child’s life and experience and something else.

This is why the primary grade social studies curriculum starts by introducing major American holidays. The children are likely to have eaten a turkey on Thanksgiving or to have seen fireworks on the Fourth of July. A skilled teacher interviews the class to get the children to offer their experiences. Then the teacher builds on them. From the foods in a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, for example, the class can be guided to become curious about the very first Thanksgiving. It leads to a discussion about Pilgrims and Native Americans. Using pictures, the children can be led to compare and contrast the various elements of the first feast with the one they are familiar with.  From the red, white and blue decorations and the fireworks of the Fourth of July that most children have experienced, they can be prompted to ask what we are celebrating. This, of course, leads to a discussion of the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. Next, the children may be introduced to a holiday from another country such as the Jewish feast of Purim, for example. The teacher may suggest that Purim has many similarities to Halloween and ask the students to figure out what they are and how the two holidays differ.

By asking key questions, a teacher may provoke elementary school children to contribute some personal memories or experiences that connect to new social studies topics. In the easy-reader chapter books about Famous Kentucky Christians, for example, we have been careful to model this process. Simon Kenton, an early Kentucky pioneer, could have been described as a bully prior to his decision to become a Christian. In the book, Big Bully – the Story of Simon Kenton, by Lesley Barker (available on Amazon.com), fourth grade Keith realizes that he has been behaving like a bully like Simon Kenton and that he wants to change. If you were about to introduce your elementary school child to the life of Simon Kenton, you could ask if they had ever been bullied or if they had ever bullied someone else. This requires them to make a self-connection. From that discussion, next you could say that you want them to think about the life of Simon Kenton and to decide if he was a bully or not and why. This gives your child a motivation to remain engaged with the new material that is based on their self-connection.

Social studies and the study of history, in general, rely on the accumulation of facts about past events, people and places. Of course, dates are part of what must be learned. Dates and timelines are ways to organize and associate one fact with another. When you assist your child to look for, identify and discuss the self-connections they associate with the facts and people in the social studies curriculum, they will remember both the details and the big picture better. They will start to see how the subject is relevant and they will be prepared to understand more complex concepts as they come up.