About the Strategy

As educators, we understand that young children acquire skills and knowledge about their world by physically touching things, and that they develop perspective by role-playing. Thus, in the lower grades, educators generally include experiential activities in their work with students. In the upper grades, however, we largely relegate "hands-on" learning to occasional projects. When teaching United States history, a hands-on learning activity might amount to little more than the construction of a poster.

Tactile or kinesthetic learning, however, is more than simply touching things. This strategy can also be applied to simulating and role-playing history, and can be put to great use introducing students to complex concepts in which there is a single influential factor with strong and varied connections throughout society. Essentially, students create a "living" concept map in which each student can play an active role in learning about or describing his or her own entity and its connections to other entities. On the topic of the railroads, for example, students become part of a physical model that represents the railroad's influence on a number of sectors in American society.

The strategy only takes a few minutes, and is effective as a short and simple illustration of the concept, as an introduction before preparing students to research their topics, and/or as a culminating assessment in which students are asked to make a connection and explain it. The activity itself doesn't teach the content, but rather provides a frame into which students can put their prior knowledge or their research. It also gives them an image that can help them retain their understanding.

This strategy can be used to illustrate or model many other concepts that changed the course of history. The strategy is especially effective at helping students see beyond the scope of a single event, phenomenon, or historical figure. It allows students to see and understand a physical representation of why something or someone mattered in history.