Introducing the North American History

Based on my experience, the best way to teach kids about history is through famous landmarks. I remember growing up with my father’s stories of Greece, Spain, Egypt and South America. He has photos taken at the Great Pyramids of Giza, Sphinx, in Acropolis, Christ the Redeemer in Rio and more. He’s telling me a bit about history through the landmarks in his photos, which fascinated me. Since then, I’ve been very interested in travelling and learning about world history. I wanted to inspire Mavi in the same way. I always start my history lessons with the famous landmarks using our travel photos and the Safari Toobs (Around the World, World Landmarks). Recently, I purchased the Safari Supertoob USA (on sale) because Mavi wanted to know more about the US (inspired by our trip there last May).

So in this post, I’m sharing how we worked on understanding the history of North America through famous landmarks, figures and playsets that depict the life of the early people of North America.

Materials I prepared:

These are the pages of the booklet I assembled for Mavi. You will see these in my North America Landmarks.

Mavi was particularly fascinated with the Liberty Bell. So we went beyond the booklet and read some more history books to learn more about the independence of the United States.

On the other hand, Vito was more interested in the bald eagle. There’s something about animals that little ones just love!

Mavi wanted to see everything in the toob in real life (LOL), especially Mount Rushmore. He liked the idea of faces carved on a mountain. He memorised the names of the presidents whose faces were carved on the hill, and then he remembered George Washington. “The bridge connecting NYC and Jersey was named after him, Mom”. He recalled that bridge! (We were staying in NJ)

Once we talked about the landmarks (including the Chichen Itza in Mexico), we proceeded to work the timeline cards of North American history. You can get these through our North America in a Nutshell. He was surprised to learn that Europeans discovered North America and that primarily they were inhabited by North American Indians (US) and Mayans in Mexico until Christopher Columbus arrived.

The next day, we set up our Playmobil Native Americans and Playmobil Wagon as a museum similar to the Museum of Natural History in NYC. Here Mavi placed the history cards and displayed the wild west and Native American people.