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history for a sensitive child


a5hley
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Do you have any recommendations for a history curriculum for a highly sensitive 1st grade student? I really need something with no descriptions of violence. Absolutely no specifics about people being beheaded, etc. I can't do the summarizing as I go with her because my daughter pulls her school books off the shelf and rereads the parts we've read together. We prefer secular materials and would like to work chronologically. Thank you so much for any suggestions.

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What historic period or region do you want to cover?

You can do history of cars or technology.

Or state history.

Or US Womens history.

You can read biographies of famous people.

We chose to do a big focus on Geography for K and 1st. We have read around the world with in the context of geography.

We have a timeline fold out book that we reference a lot when we read books.

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For our 1st grader (along with his K sister), we have used Build Your Library, Level 0 - Around the World. Our older dd is very sensitive, and when she was in 4th grade, I was planning to do Modern History. She was clearly not able to handle that, so we studied the Presidents and US geography.

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You don't need to do history with a 1st grader.  Geography is more concrete for young kids. You can do cultural geography by reading about different countries and mapping them and then adding stories about the countries.  (Five in a Row has some ideas for this if you want.  For example, The Story of Ping, reading about China, making a salt dough map of the Yangtze River, adding in a study of ducks/migrations/habitats, etc)  You could easily do a geography study centered around family history. 

You could to social studies about your community, etc.  Lots of options.

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Adding my voice to those that say choose geography, maps, and cultures over history for 1st grade if your child is not ready for history.  I can't imagine doing history without the violence, it would not serve much purpose.  

One of our favorite projects as a family when my oldest was about that age was a family timeline.  We went back as far as their oldest living relative's birth.  Then we drew out the timeline and included births, marriages, moves, historic-ish things they might know (first time mom got a home computer, smartphones invented, man on the moon, presidents elected, ...).  We used a lot of family photos to fill it out, along with historic pictures found online.  

The passage of time, especially thousands of years, is so incredibly abstract that starting with a more concrete timeline can be a helpful introduction to history.  Then exercises like (at the same scale) how long would the timeline need to be to get back to George Washington, Jesus Christ, the Great Pyramid ... can give a feel for just how long we've been around.  

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Thanks everyone for your suggestions. We have been doing geography and civics/community for K this year and I was planning to do ancients next year. She's very interested in space so I might go with big bang through the establishment of civilizations and then cover those early civilizations in more of a cultural way.

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I would guess that if you want to cover History sans-violence or the hard-edged stuff, that you should look into public school textbooks. They're typically written to hit the middle so you can always add to them, but they'll provide the basics without any really upsetting stuff. I can't recommend a specific text/series for History, and it's hard to tell whats in them without hunting them down in person and perusing them. But a list of publishers to get you started would be:
McGraw Hill, Pearson, Scott Foresman, SRA, Houghton MIfflin and Harcourt.

If you are open to doing US History than Open Court Reading and Writing: From Sea to Shining Sea is a US History Primer written at the 2nd grade level and meant to take ~1 semester. From Sea to Shining Sea coverage of US History is gentle, lacks violence and provides a broad over-view of US history that isn't dumbed down or babyish. You can easily build it out using articles, documentaries and additional books to be meatier if you want.

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