TimeLine
Time-lines are a great visual project that will help to anchor your students historical knowledge. Many types of time-lines are commercially available however, the most meaningful is to have your child make their own. Because this is a long-term project, it will promote lifelong learning and pictures, dates and other information can be added each year. For example, if you read about the Pilgrims and Squanto at Thanksgiving, this would be a good time to have your child depict this in a drawing on the time-line. If you happen to have a discussion about Egypt, then again, have your child draw a something about Egypt in the proper place on the time-line. Your timeline project does not need to be limited by the grade level curriculum, but by the topics that are of interest to you and your family.
The information entered can also include various famous people from science and math fields, as well as musicians, artists and sports figures. Family members dates of birth can be included as well as the child’s own birth-date and picture. This really gives the student a perspective of time when they can see their own family on this time-line in relation to other historical events. As your child adds people and events that are of interest to him/her, this timeline becomes very personal, and most will keep these timelines to use and enjoy throughout their school years.
To make this time-line begin by determining how many feet you can accommodate in your home. This is something that will need to be rolled out frequently in order to add items and to see the big picture. When not in use, it can be rolled up and put in the closet, or if you have an area where you display work and do schoolwork, you might have room there to hang this project. I will give directions here for 20, 30, 50 and 100 ft time-lines. The rolls are available at parent teacher stores and generally come in 100 ft rolls. They can be 12-18 inches in height. The directions assume you will begin at 3000 BC and continue to 2100 AD. This would be 60 centuries and each century would have the same amount of space allocated.
100 ft would allow 20 inches per century
50 ft would allow 10 inches per century
30 ft would allow 6 inches per century
20 ft would allow 4 inches per century
Please comment on how you use your timelines in your family.
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I’m thinking about creating a timeline in our downstairs hallway — or actually, *two* timelines. One would depict a time range from 4000 BC to present date. The other would be a blowup of more modern times. I figure that up until Renaissance times, we don’t need as fine a resolution on the timeline as we would for later time periods.
By extracting a modern period and blowing it up right beneath the larger timeline, I’m hoping it will give us enough space to track our historical studies while helping them see how busy history has become comparatively in recent times.