The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Welcome to the Sequoia Breeze podcast, a breath of fresh air for your home school. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Thank you for joining us today, listeners. I'm excited to have Scott Steffens with us today, who is an HST with Feather River. He is here today to talk to us about teaching history and the importance of that, some tips and tricks, and why we shouldn't always leave that one on the shelf when our days get busy and things get hectic. Welcome, Scott.

Scott: Thank you very much for having me. Glad to be here.

Rebecca: So, Scott, welcome to the podcast booth. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family.

Scott: Sure. Well, I'm originally from the Bay Area and I've been living in Sacramento since 2010, happily married to my wonderful wife Ashley, and I have one son who's 22 months old. He's a joy to have in our lives, and he's super cute, and he recently started to run around the house. So it's all kinds of fun chasing a toddler around my house right now.

Rebecca: Fun and adventure, I'm sure.

Scott: Absolutely. Yeah.

Rebecca: So tell us a little bit about how you became interested enough in history that that's what you got your credential in.

Scott: Oh, my goodness. That goes all the way back to when I was maybe ten years old. My dad loves history too. So I was in his office one day and I pulled out this book about the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. And I'd never seen it before, and I just started looking at it. It was pictures of the ruins and the villas and all this amazing stuff and all these amazing artifacts that we covered. And if you're not familiar with the story of Pompeii, it was an ancient Roman city in southern Italy that was destroyed by a volcano in the first century, and it was rediscovered in, like, the 18th century. And since then, archaeologists have been excavating that town. And I was amazed by this, of course, and I asked my dad, like, dad, what is this? He said, oh, that's ancient city of Pompeii. It looks like that because it was buried by a volcanic eruption almost 2000 years ago. I was amazed, and I'm still fascinated by it. As a matter of fact, I went there four years ago.

Rebecca: Oh, wow.

Scott: Yeah. So that moment of discovering that book, really, that was the start of a love affair that has continued and grown, and it's branched out into other areas of history that I've fallen in love with. Not just ancient Roman history, but also I've fallen in love with American history. And I even like European history. Like modern European history. When it came down to me becoming a teacher, I was a freshman in college and I knew I wanted to go into education. I just wasn't quite sure if I wanted to do, like, elementary or even high school. But my passion for history really drew me towards becoming a history teacher. So since then, I've been focused on mostly teaching middle school and high school history.

Rebecca: Awesome. So I think sometimes in home schooling, history is one of those topics that can get a little bit shoved to the side when the pressure of making sure that we've got solid math foundation, solid reading and phonics foundation, and we're learning how to write and the day gets busy and we're dealing with multiple kids, and it's easy to think, well, history is not going anywhere. That's right. So what would you say to home school parents that are dealing with that and that are trying to figure out, is this important enough to make a priority?

Scott: Yeah, that's a really good question, and I can totally understand how there's such a huge push for reading and math to be super solid. What I like to do as a teacher is that there's always ways to incorporate really good reading into history, and there's so much good stuff out there that can really supplement any type of reading program with topics related to social studies. And it's never too early to start, even for kindergarten. There's little books about neighborhoods in your community, which is social studies. And that's one of the earlier I can statements for younger grades, is learning about your neighborhood, who works in your neighborhood? And when you walk down the street, like, what do you see? Do you see the fire department? Do you see your neighborhood church? Do you see your local neighborhood school? And things like that. So little small children's books like that can be a really good tie in for social studies.

Rebecca: Okay. We've done some of that at our house that we try to do a lot of literature based history stuff, and it helps, I think, connect the stories. History is not, I think, what you're trying to say, a bunch of dates and names and things to memorize, which some people who haven't had the opportunity in their life to really delve into, like, these are actually people, they're stories there. And I think that sometimes the literature addition to history can really help absolutely build that up.

Scott: As a matter of fact, as we get into second and third grade social studies, it's a focus on family. Yeah. One of the classes that I'm going to be teaching for Adventure Academy is My Family and Me, and it talks about how getting to know the family history, asking your parents the questions, well, where did my ancestors come from? Or in bringing out a map of the world and using thumbtacks to pinpoint exactly what country that your family come from, and then pulling out old photographs and taking a look at, oh, this is my great grandmother that came from Italy in 19 two, and things like that. That's all social studies for the young grades. And you're right. A lot of times families are not quite sure how to teach history. As we get into, like, fifth grade and then even into middle school, because when I was a kid, that was how social studies was taught, mainly. This is a bunch of great dates, and this person was president from 1861 to 1865, and this document said this and things like that, which is all good. We want kids to have that foundational content knowledge, reference points, reference points. We want them to know dates. We want them to know what happened on July 4, 1776.

Rebecca: But that's not what made you fall in love with history.

Scott: It's not what made me fall in love with history. Some of the things that really, as a history teacher, what I've come to really love how to do and really love to teach over now seven years of teaching history is the ideas behind the Declaration of Independence, for example. And that has kind of informed my teaching on to asking really deep history questions. The more that I teach history, the more it really informs my approach. So, for example, it is a good question to ask and to teach kids what happened on July 4, 1776. Of course, that's Independence Day. That's when the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Another question that I would pose to kids in, let's say, like a middle school course would be to ask them the question, okay, which of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence are the most important ones? Now, that's a deep history question right there. Another question that I've asked my students before is, does the US. Constitution or let me rephrase that slightly to what extent does the US. Constitution prevent tyranny? And we do a deep, deep dive into the US. Constitution and identify the main themes of the Constitution, of which there are typically four that I teach, and we really get to understand in a very deep level the US. Constitution and how it works and the Declaration of Independence. And we also I also want them to kind of know the origins of the ideas that underpin these documents. So I taught a class in Adventure Academy last year where we kind of do a dive into the philosophy of some of the Enlightenment philosophers that lived in Britain in the 17th and 18th century that wrote about some of the principles that eventually made their way into the Constitution.

Rebecca: So is that Adventure Academy class with middle schoolers?

Scott: Yeah, middle school class.

Rebecca: Those are big thoughts.

Scott: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Rebecca: And do you see that being an important skill for those kids to have in our current day, in our current political climate?

Scott: Absolutely. And then it's a very important skill for them to be able to analyze historical documents and to be able to read the historical documents. And, of course, I emphasize that they get to form their own opinion about it. It's very important for me as a history teacher to stay neutral and not really come with any agenda. And I always tell my kids, I'm not here to change your views about anything. I'm not even going to challenge your views. But I do want to expose you to some of these ideas that were very influential in influencing some of our Founding Fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson. And a lot of the ideas that you're going to read eventually made their way into the Declaration of Independence. And then if we are going to study the Constitution, I want the kids to know that there is this idea out there that the US. Constitution is infused with the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. So they talk about in the Declaration of Independence the idea that we are born with natural rights. Thomas Jefferson wrote that in the second paragraph. I just want the kids to know, have a strong foundation of what the Constitution has in it and where it came from and where it came from.

Rebecca: So that they can understand the applications or the wrestling with the applications that might be occurring.

Scott: Right? Yeah. That knowledge is a good tool for them to use today. As they start to learn more about the world and as they start to learn more about what's going on in the United States today, they'll have that backdrop to be able to go back to what they learned in a history class and think, oh, okay, that makes sense today. Or I can take a look at this current event that is happening today and view it from the lens of history and be like, okay, I can make sense of what that person is saying over there because I understand what Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Rebecca: I think more people that think and fewer people that just shout, no matter where you're coming from, is really an important thing that our country needs absolutely right now. So you covered us a little bit, but let's go a little deeper with it. So for parents who are listening to this, who are still either have very small children or just getting into home schooling, when should they start teaching history?

Scott: I would say kindergarten would be a good time to start thinking about not so much the deeper history questions, but I think kindergarten would be a good time for parents to start telling their kids about some aspects of social studies, like the neighborhood. And as they get a little older, they're going to start covering things about the family. And I think that's a really good thing to allow kids to ask questions about, okay, where did my family come from? Or who are my great grandparents? How long has my family been in the United States? And I can trace my family all the way back to the 17th century in Massachusetts. It's a cool thing to do well.

Rebecca: And all of that helps. A five year old doesn't really know that anything outside of his self, his small world, his house matters. So that you start with a neighborhood, and then you expand to where your family fits in the world. And there's a world, and you're just slowly expanding their perspective of what's going on around them and helping them to look up and out and see that there are other places and other people.

Scott: That's right.

Rebecca: As their brains are going through that sort of stage of development that's right. By the time they get to what age, are they really starting to move beyond themselves? Because that's everything. Their neighborhood, their family, it's all about them still, because that's where little kids focus. But now it's time to understand there's a lot more going on in the world than just me.

Scott: That's right.

Rebecca: And what age do you think that really starts?

Scott: That starts at about fifth grade.

Rebecca: Okay.

Scott: I think and a cool thing that I've done with fifth graders in the past, when I was in a brick and mortar, is get them to understand different perspectives of history.

Rebecca: Okay?

Scott: And there's a kind of a cool way that I did it. I gave the class an assignment where I told the kids, ask your mom the story of your birth, okay. And see how it compares to what another family member knows about the story of your birth. Ask your dad, ask your grandparents. What do you remember about? And then I told him, Write it all down, and then come back to class the next day and tell me what was different between all the different stories that your family members told you. And then how is it different than what you knew about the story of your birth? And I had kids come up back to me the next day, and they would say things like, my dad told me things that I had no idea about. And then, of course, my mom told me things that my dad didn't know about. And I said, well, that kind of makes sense because your mom gave birth to you and your dad did not. But the idea behind doing the activity like that is to get the kids to understand different perspectives of things that happened in the past, because that's kind of what history is, different perspectives from the past. And everybody is going to have a different perspective of events that happened in the past. And that's okay. We have to acknowledge that. We have to respect that. And the perspectives are not always going to agree. And then that whole idea of different perspectives touches on the idea of different historical narratives. And everybody has a different historical narrative depending on where they come from and their experience with historical events and things like that, which is great. We want kids to have experience and to acknowledge their own historical perspectives. And my role as a teacher is not to discount that perspective, but to allow kids to express it and to become familiar with it and understand it.

Rebecca: I love hearing stories about light bulb moments for kids or times when you saw when kids really started to get things. Do you have any stories from your years of teaching that you can share with us?

Scott: Sure. So there's one really cool story of when I was teaching my teacher history class. That class is meant to expose students to ancient Roman culture through the food that they eat. So I'm really like cooking food, a live cooking class to a group of middle schoolers. And one of the recipes was this really yummy bread. It's called mushroom bread. And it's not called mushroom bread because you put mushrooms in the recipe. It's called mushroom bread because of how it looks after you bake it. It kind of, like, rises out of the pan and gets the shape of, like, a mushroom on top of it. And so you're always a little worried as a teacher doing a live cooking class, like, oh, my goodness, someone's going to drop something.

Rebecca: A lot could go wrong.

Scott: Someone is going to get burned, and things like that. But I'm thinking, like, okay, things seem to be going really well, and I'm really happy with the progress of this. And after we were finished, I saw a lot of kids be like, say things like, wow, I can't wait to do this. This smells so delicious. It smells so awesome. And later on, I was scrolling through the Sequoia Grove Facebook page, and there's a picture of one of my students with her finished mushroom bread with a huge smile on her face. And her parent wrote something really awesome about how her daughter was so happy and made this delicious bread. And I'm thinking, like, that really fills my bucket as a teacher.

Rebecca: Yeah. So you were doing this remotely, and you're teaching them, and they were in.

Scott: Their own kitchen, from their own kitchen.

Rebecca: Making their own version of this bread on their own. Okay, so you have no control over them burning themselves?

Scott: No control. There's always that thought, like, okay, something could go wrong, but their parents got to be right there in the same room.

Rebecca: Right.

Scott: And I'm there in my kitchen, and it's so fun to do. It is really fun thing to do.

Rebecca: Suddenly they have a connection of having made this thing that they used to make an ancient Rome and tasted it and smelled it, and now, like, all of their senses are involved in understanding this historical time.

Scott: Absolutely. And what better way to explore Roman culture than through the food that they eat because they can make it right. We have the ancient recipes from 2000 years ago that we can replicate in modern day kitchens.

Rebecca: That's fascinating.

Scott: Yeah.

Rebecca: So that's obviously a way to make history really interesting and engaging and personal to a student. Do you have some other ideas of how home school parents can really make this engaging that you can get up from a textbook. You don't have to just read the facts. You can taste it and touch it and feel it. And what are some other ideas about how to make history lesson really engaging?

Scott: Oh, so many really cool ways. One way is to turn history into, like, a puzzle that we have to solve and do some historical detective work. And there is something that I use called DBQ, and I'm happy to share it with you and with anybody who wants it. The document based question okay. Where a student is presented with a question. And the little paper documents, they're small packets. The packet contains primary source evidence.

Rebecca: Okay. And tell us what that is. Nobody's heard of that before.

Scott: Primary source document is either an artifact or a written piece that comes from the time period that we're studying. So, for example, a recipe from the ancient world that was written by an ancient cook.

Rebecca: Okay.

Scott: That's a primary source document or a piece of I literally saw this with my own eyes when I actually went to the city of Pompeii. A real loaf of charred bread oh, that's easy. From almost 2000 years ago. Or a knife that the cookie used to cook his food that was discovered in the ruins. And even more recently, the Declaration of Independence. The real one that's found in Washington, DC. And the National Archives, that's a primary source document. One that I did with my students in the past is we were studying early colonial history, and I posed the question, what happened to the lost colony of Roanoke? And the story, a brief history of that is the English established a small colony on the island of Roanoke off of North Carolina in about the year 1588. And the leader of that colony sailed back to England to get more supplies. And then he sailed back next year to the same spot, only to discover that everybody was gone and the settlement disappeared. And to this day, we still don't know what happened. There are some theories not dead, but gone. Gone. Yeah. Some clues were left there. And this DDQ packet that I shared with the students asked the question, what's the best theory that we have to explain why this colony suddenly disappeared? As they go through the packet, each page presents them with a little bit of evidence. One of the pieces of evidence that they discovered back in the early 1990s was some bullets that were left in the ground. And the kids have to try to wrestle with that piece of evidence and think, well, what does that suggest to us? Could a battle had been fought? Could the Native Americans kill them all? And then on the next page, there's another piece of evidence that they have to wrestle with. There was carved onto a tree, the word Crow atone, which is a neighboring island. Could they have escaped the island of Roanoke and traveled to Croatone and continued on with the colony. And then there's some crazy theories that UFOs abducted them, which is useful because kids could very easily go with that theory. But then as a history teacher, I got to train the kids to think, okay, is there any evidence to support that theory?

Rebecca: Right.

Scott: And if they say no, then I teach them. Okay, that's not a usable theory. Then you have to throw it out. You have to focus on what the evidence tells us to come up with a theory. So the main thing is for them at the end is to write a report stating what their best theory is based on the evidence that they have in place.

Rebecca: Okay.

Scott: That's a good history puzzle. And that's what real historians do in the field, is that they study artifacts, they study old documents, and they come up with a reasonable conclusion based on all of that. And that's really great history work. And that incorporates so many important skills that we want to teach our children.

Rebecca: Critical thinking.

Scott: Critical thinking.

Rebecca: As well as reading actual information and reading.

Scott: Yeah, analytical reading. Being able to analyze a primary source document is extremely important, and that's applicable to so many different subject areas.

Rebecca: And then being able to dissimilate those thoughts into a decision.

Scott: That's right.

Rebecca: And a paper.

Scott: Absolutely.

Rebecca: And write it all down.

Scott: Absolutely.

Rebecca: So clearly that's not an activity for a first grader. We're talking about older kids.

Scott: This is for older kids.

Rebecca: But it's a way to take all those skills you've been working on in those younger years and start to put them together.

Scott: And put them all together. Absolutely. And that's such a great skill that I want to teach kids.

Rebecca: So we will link information about DBQs in the show notes to explain how to get those from you.

Scott: Yes, absolutely. Awesome.

Rebecca: What a great resource. Do you have any other resources that you want to tell us about?

Scott: I do, as a matter of fact. And I've used this one as a classroom teacher, and I'm going to use it again this year as a teacher on Adventure Virtual Academy. It's called the Stanford History Education group. And it's a really great resource of history lessons published by Stanford University that can be used for kids in fifth grade all the way up to 12th grade in high school.

Rebecca: Okay. Are these resources free?

Scott: They are free. You do have to make a free account with the website, but it's really easy to do. They're not going to charge you anything. And there's history lessons that are very similar to the DBQs that I just discussed, where it presents some primary source documents, and students have to work through them and analyze them and read them and take notes on them and then write some sort of a response to them. Some of them. I think there's some essay prompts in there as well. And there are really great lessons about early colonial history, about ancient history, actually the activity that I talked about earlier about I discussed the activity about learning about the history of your birth. That's in there too.

Rebecca: Okay.

Scott: It's kind of a cool activity for kids to do. And I've used it for there's history lessons in there related to, like, US history, all the way to like, ancient history and even, I think, 20th century history. So there's a wide range of lessons in there that parents can use.

Rebecca: So parents shouldn't be intimidated by all of this, but instead perhaps go into teaching history with an attitude of let's explore this together. Some parents probably had richer history education than others. And so there may be a real learning curve for some of the parents that are listening right now as far as how to engage with history or how to find it interesting or applicable to our everyday lives. But I hope that listening to you, they've felt inspired to go explore it with their students.

Scott: Oh, absolutely. And then we're fortunate enough to live in central California where we've got the missions that we can go on a field trip to. And you can really delve into history, living history. There. We have Sudden Sport, which is a really cool place to go to. And I know there's some Civil War reenactor groups that do living history events. And that's actually a really great way to experience history, is to go see what it was really like.

Rebecca: Lots of field trip potential.

Scott: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Within the study of history, even understanding the European tradition that brought those missions to California, there can be some links perhaps to oh, absolutely. Different pieces of and this is not for good or for bad. There are lessons to be learned in what happened, and you can still understand sort of mentalities and perspectives and where people are coming from by going to these various places and seeing how they lived in the decisions that they made.

Scott: Oh, absolutely. And you bring up a really great point because it's really important to know that in the 18th century, spanish missionaries came out to California. They built these missions in certain spots in Sonoma. San Francisco, san Jose.

Rebecca: Santa Barbara.

Scott: Santa Barbara. San Diego. And then it's also an important question to say, well, why do they build them? Why what was the purpose of them? And that opens up another can of worms as to, okay, Spanish missionaries came in here and what was their intent behind their actions to build these? And that's a really interesting area to explore for students to learn about. And then just up the road up here in Coloma I love Colombia Mill. It's a really great town.

Rebecca: Yeah. And even if some of our listeners are in their further reaches of Northern California, if you ever have a chance to come down to Coloma, it's where it all started. It's where the gold rush began. And they really do a good job up there of giving you a good experience, right?

Scott: Absolutely. That's a great living history experience right there.

Rebecca: Well, thank you, Scott, so much for joining us today. And do you have any final words that you would like to share with parents today before we sign off?

Scott: Turn history into a puzzle that can be solved, that engages so many more.

Rebecca: Pieces of the brain.

Scott: Engages so many more pieces of the brain.

Rebecca: The whole child, the whole parent, and.

Scott: It makes it challenging, and it sounds.

Rebecca: Like it would create a lot of great memories.

Scott: Absolutely.

Rebecca: That time we made mushroom bread together.

Scott: Yes, absolutely. And history is something that can be super fun and super engaging and also challenging.

Rebecca: Thank you, Scott, so much for being here today. I really enjoyed our conversation about ways to make history more exciting for kids more accessible and how important it is to learn where we have come from to understand where we are and where we're going in our future. And that is a gift we can give our kids as we are educating them. So thank you for joining us.

Scott: You're very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Rebecca: Tell us, what do you love about home schooling?

Speaker C: My name is Roman and I'm third grade, and my favorite thing about home school is that we don't have to spend a lot of time at the school.

Speaker C: Hi. My name is Risa. We home school grades five and eight, and what I like about homeschooling is the flexibility and the ability to spend quality family time together.

Speaker C: My name is Isabela, and what I like about home schooling is a more flexible schedule and you're able to have more free time.

Rebecca: Thank you for joining me today, listeners, as I spoke with Scott Steffens about the subject of history and how we can make it an engaging and fun subject to do with our kids, I hope that you found today's episode of The Sequoia Breeze to be a breath of fresh air for your home school. I am your host, Rebecca Losavio, and as always, please send me an email podcasts@sequoiagrove.org and let me know. What do you think? What are your favorite resources for teaching history? I'd love to hear from you.