How to Make Black History Month
Last All Year!
Activities, tips, and advice to help you motivate children to excellence through History and Culture

Enjoying Black History With Your Children

Copyright 2006-2010 by Jeffery Bradley - All Rights Reserved -- Contact Info
The published version of "How to Make Black History Month Last All Year!" purchased direct from the publisher here.

Studying black history can be challenging because as a parent, you are competing against television, radio, computers, video games, and school. Plus, it is very difficult for children to take learning serious when they are not in school. That’s why it is important to make learning black history fun and easy with our children. Below are a few tips to keep the process fun, easy, and educational.

Learn As You Go

You don’t have to know all the facts or fully understand black history to help your children learn. Your willingness to learn with them-to read, to ask questions, to search, and to make mistakes-is the most important gift you can bring to the process. By viewing their mistakes as sources of information for future efforts, your children gain confidence to continue learning.

Later in this guide is a wonderful section that highlights the contributions of African Americans who have changed America and the world in some form or fashion. Each profile is quick, easy, and fun to read. You should read this chapter at least twice so you can get a good idea of how much African Americans have contributed to the world.

Conversation Is The Key

Conversation gets you past the difficult moments. Keeping open the communication between you and your children, and encouraging continued discussion no matter how off the mark your children may seem, tells them you take them seriously and value their efforts to learn. The ability to have a conversation with your children profoundly affects what and how they learn.

Children have their own ideas and interests. By letting them choose activities accordingly, you let them know their ideas and interests are valuable. Often they will want to teach you as a way to use what they know. Share their interests and encourage them to learn more.

Make the most of everyday opportunities to do history: visit grandparents, read books and magazines for and by African Americans, tell African stories, remember and honor African American holidays, and visit museums. If your child asks about a person in a painting or picture, stop to find out who it is. Keep asking: “What does this mean? How do I know?”

Few Tips on Studying Black History

Studying black history is more than memorizing names and dates. While being able to recall the details of great people and events is important, the enjoyment of black history is enhanced by engaging in activities and experiencing history as a “story well told.”

Original sources and literature are real experiences. Reading the actual words that affected black history , and stories that focus on the details of time and place help children know that black history is about real people in real places who made real sacrifices and choices that had some real consequences, and that they could have made different choices.

There are some wonderful authors in our history who wrote wonderful stories about their lives as both slaves and free citizens. Writers such as Zora Neal Hurston, Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Frederick Douglas wrote a host of novels, poems, non-fiction and fiction that can teach us first hand accounts of life in America during and after slavery. And today, great writer like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Nathan McCall, Haki R. Madhubuti, and others continue the legacy of penning our history to paper.

Learning black history is best done in the same way we learn to cook or play basketball: we do it as well as read about it.

Doing black history means asking questions about historical events and characters; searching our towns for signs of its history; talking with others about current events and issues; writing our own stories about the past.

There is no final word on black history. There are good storytellers and less good storytellers. And there are many stories. But very rarely does any one storyteller “get it right,” or one story say it all. A good student of black history will always look for other points of view, knowing that our understanding of history changes over time.

The Goal

When our children begin to learn and study black history, they start to make positive changes. They develop a sense of confidence and motivation because they see what their ancestors have accomplished and can rise up to their greatness. They truly understand the great quote by Marcus Garvey, “A people without a knowledge of their history is like a tree without roots.”

Today African American educators are working to promote the study of black history in the schools and at home. Knowledge of our history enables us to understand our culture’s traditions, its conflicts with American society, and its central ideas and values.

We hope to encourage children to love black history and to enjoy learning about it. This resource guide is a tool you can use to stimulate your children’s active involvement in the black history that surrounds them every day.

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