Histominoes
The fun way to learn history!
Hands up who remembers the dull and boring history lessons in school when you wished you were outside playing or doing anything other than sitting there at your desk?
We think most of us can agree that learning history in a classroom setting can be dull and boring but Histominoes changes that for children. Histominoes are a fun way for children to learn basic historical facts in an interactive and stimulating way.
Histominoes supports and compliments the primary school National Curriculum in England, Wales, N.Ireland and Scotland.
We all know that not everybody learns in the same way, and being spouted names, dates and facts is not everyone’s ideal way to learn about the past. Histominoes are aimed at the kinaesthetic learner - those who learn best by physically interacting with the topic; children with special educational needs, who need extra support; or those that need to catch up quickly due to absence or other reasons.
Histominoes aims to help children learn the basic facts of a given historical topic in an interactive and visual way. Working individually or as a team, matching and pairing the two halves of information from each card using the illustrations as a guide, children begin to learn a bit more about the historical topic in focus.
Each card is illustrated with images relating to the specific information being given. The text used is clear, large and easy to read.
Not everybody learns in the same way….
Our history..
I founded Histominoes as a way of bringing colour and fun to history for children, coming from a family of teachers, and being an ESOL teacher myself, this was second nature to me. The need or desire to make things simple yet fun, to engage learning through play, and to encourage independent learning at the same time.
I was one of those kids who thought that everything was black and white in the olden days - well, the films and photographs proved it, didn’t they? As far as I was concerned history was full of dust and darkness, there was hardly any light or warmth, everything was dirty and covered in mud because there were no washing machines, indoor toilets or showers and I wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t dark and dingy. Aged seven, history was not for me.
My interest in history was spiked when learning about World War I in school as a teenager. The history I was learning about tied in with the tales I had been told by my nan who had lived through it, and who had watched as her own dad went off to fight in that war. Luckily he came back.
The interest ebbed and flowed throughout the years until I had to teach it as part of an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) course to adults wanting to take their Citizenship exam. My students’ desire to learn about all things British and how Britain has become the nation that it is, with all the glory and the faults of the past, completely reignited my interest in our island’s history. Seeing my students and their families enjoy using card games to learn both the English language and elements of its history; and watching them engage, both with the subject and each other, inspired me to develop the learning aids I had hand-made for them into Histominoes.
Realising that children today are no different from myself as a child, I created Histominoes. After all, it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I fully understood the difference between Elizabethans and Tudors; there isn’t much of one, they were all part of the same dynasty, it’s just that Queen Elizabeth I got an era named after her, specifying the later part of the Tudor era.
Rather than spoon-feeding children all things history which often backfires when dates become a blur and the order of things become tangled I have tried to make this more simplistic and fun. After all history is about humans, other people just like us, who happened to live a long time ago. Their lives were full of colour, love, laughter, wars and struggles just like today. And our lives will one day will be interwoven with the past, and the children of the future will be looking back at what happened today and hopefully learning about us with the same amount of interest.
I hope you enjoy learning and playing with Histominoes as much as I have enjoyed its creation.
best wishes,
Jo
We are trying to be as environmentally friendly as possible; all our Histominoes sets are printed and packaged in the UK using sustainable sources.