“Ok so now you tell me the story.”
Her lips pursed and she tried to remember what I had said using the poorly drawn illustrations. I always doodle when I talk, thinking that maybe others are visual learners like myself. (Days like today I wonder if it’s a help or a hindrance.)
“There was the beginning of the earth, here”, she began, stabbing the globe with a finger. “People don’t all agree about the age of the earth, though.”
“Right.”
Her eyes zeroed in on the page.
“Ok so then the Stone Age,” she continued, “and that’s when people were mainly hunter-gatherers, and hunted in small groups.”
“Yes. What else?”
“Then there was a development of farming, when that one person discovered you could plant seeds. And that led to people not moving around as much and developing farms.”
“The Agricultural Revolution, right.” (I know there were more than one, and they spanned several thousands years, but she’s nine and doesn’t need to remember that today.) “What else happened?”
“Then….let me think. Ok, then people started, you know, having animals for food and stuff.”
“They started domesticating animals,” I chimed.
“Yep. Ok and then being so close to animals sometimes made people sick with diseases, like….”she looked to me for help.
“Yes! Like measles and smallpox. And then what?”
“Well, they discovered bronze. And that changed the way people fought, especially since they had farms and land and everything now.”
“Ok, good, yes. What happened at the end of the Bronze Age?”
“Historians don’t really know—there were these people from the sea that came but people don’t really know where they came from. And then…I don’t really remember.”
“Well, when the people from the sea came, eventually the routes for trading bronze broke down. A lot of things broke down, do you remember talking about that? We call it the….Bronze Age….”
“Collapse!”
“Right! It would be like if another country conquered the United States, and all the ways that we communicate, buy food, transport things—all of that stuff broke down because the old system we used was gone. There would be chaos for a while and then a new system would take its place,” I drew some more terrible illustrations as I spoke.
“But then people discovered iron,” she said.
“Which began the….”
“Iron Age!”
“Yes exactly. Did everywhere in the world learn about and use iron all at the same time?” I asked.
“No, because there was no way to tell everyone about it like there is now. And if you had iron, you were stronger probably and could defeat people who didn’t have it.”
“Exactly.”
We looked over the drawings.
“Do you know what historians call these three time periods? Stone, Bronze, and Iron?”
She shook her head.
“The Ancient Period. There are three really huge periods in history; the Ancient period, the Middle Ages, and Modern Ages….well, historians break them down in various pieces and not everyone agrees, especially when you factor in the ways in which certain things developed around the world”—I noticed her starting to zone out, the 4th grade version of checking her watch—“but…we’ll talk more about that one day.”
“Tomorrow?” she looked at me warily.
“No! More like a few years from now,” I reassured her. “I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
“Everything?” she raised her eyebrows.
“Everything.”
The Homeschool Historian 