The 5th Grade teacher on this website uses 'Voicethread' with historical photographs. Click on the video "Ellis Island" to see how primary students build a historical narrative around a visual image. Voice thread transforms media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting.
Don't underestimate the importance of historical language in developing historical understanding. Provide opportunities for students to expand their historical vocabulary and to use language for a variety of purposes.
Young students need explicit instructions for when and how to use conventions of language.
Husbands (1996) identifies different types of historical language including:
1. The language of the past (e.g. convict, First Fleet, monarchy, revolution)
2. The language of historical time (century, period, modern, decade)
3. The language of historical processes (cause, chronology, similarity, difference)
4. The language of historical description and analysis (revolution, monarchy, democracy)
Use 'Word Walls' or word charts to help students keep track of information and terminology that is used in a Unit of Work and keep adding new words.
While timelines play a vital role in organising and representing historical time, primary aged children make sense of a timeline if they can make connections to their prior knowledge.
Design learning activities that involve making comparisons between then and now. Start with making connections with the material or social aspects of life (e.g. school, clothes, toys, transport) in the past.
According to Levstik and Barton (2005), understanding historical time involves:
Research shows that children are better at sequencing historical periods (e.g. convict era, colonial Australia) than assigning dates or names to those periods. Dates often don't allow students to visualise
the time being referred to. As such, teachers can facilitate learning by helping students visualise images of history with the corresponding dates. Help students make distinctions between broad categories of time (close to now, a long time ago, in the 1800s etc).