Far Away and Long Ago

If you want to make your history teaching more meaningful to your students and more rewarding to yourself, welcome to Monica Edinger's classroom, where studying long ago events and far away places is a vital, exciting collaboration.

Monica's fourth-grade students are historians. They consider events from their own lives, use oral history to explore other people's stories, investigate multiple perspectives, and examine documents and artifacts to interpret historical events. They experiment with ways of telling history: writing personal histories, creating picture books, producing research reports, and staging performances. Together Monica and her students grapple with the complexities of the past in order to make better sense of the present. Examining immigration from the perspective of a recent arrival from the Caribbean or from a Pilgrim hundreds of years ago makes history real and compelling to these young historians.

As one classroom teacher's personal narrative on the development, teaching, and assessment of her curriculum, Far Away and Long Ago features:

• an overview of current issues regarding history in the elementary school;
• curriculum units ranging from the near to the far, from the recent to the distant past, including topics such as memoir, immigration, Native Americans, and the Pilgrims;
• detailed descriptions on how each unit was developed, taught, and assessed;
• examples and analysis of student work;
• teaching goals and reflections on the complexities of teaching history today.

Woven throughout this personal narrative are practical suggestions written by co-author, Stephanie Fins, a museum educator, who collaborated with Monica as she developed and taught her history curriculum. Stephanie provides a rich variety of practical teaching suggestions, topic extensions, and professional resources:

• Zooming In: informational essays on topics that support the historical content.
• Booktalks: reviews of relevant professional books.
• Tools of the Trade: practical ideas to support and extend classroom work.
• On-Line Resources: related Internet sites that offer text, images, audio material, and "virtual" tours of historic sites.

Far Away and Long Ago will expand the ways teachers think about history and provide elementary and middle school practitioners with new ways to teach this lively subject.