Elementary students can learn how to take an interpretive approach to learning history so that they can construct knowledge about collective past experience in ways that provide a meaningful context for understanding present experience. Like historians, children communicate their interpretations to others by telling or writing stories in which they "do not discover the past so much as they create it; they choose the events and people that they think constitute the past, and they decide what about them is important to know." The stories or historical narrative accounts are selective for practical and personal reasons. They are practical because it is impossible for anyone to know or gain access to all of the facts surrounding an event, and personal because an individual's life experiences, beliefs, and values influence the choice of phenomena and ways in which that person assigns causality and significance to events. Historical narratives and the sources of evidence relied on to create them require interpretation because they are inherently selective, incomplete, and value based. This article discusses why it is important to teach children to interpret the past and challenges to interpreting the past with children. Suggested activities for teaching elementary students how to interpret the past are appended.