Making the Study of History Exciting and Fun From the perspective of a history nut. History is not just a collection of dry facts and dates, meaningless names and obscure stories of battles in places whose names you can't pronounce. If it were, I would never have become as excited about it as I am now.
History is about real people doing exciting things.
It is also about those lurid details that sixth and seventh graders the world over seem to love so much, a story well-told. This kind of reasoning and cause and effect argument is not very meaningful to young students who don't have any mental picture of what the lives of these people were like or the world in which they lived. Real understanding of timelines, scale, largeness, comparative interval, and a vivid mental picture of the relationships of dates requires that the student internalize some quite sophisticated number sense skills. On looking back upon my own education, I really didn't develop this kind of thinking myself until after I was in college. In order to bring meaning to these events, young people need to see the average person living in antiquity or the middle ages as very poor with little to eat.