Objective:
To encourage students to think about time, and to give them a sense of the “depth” of time. It is often difficult for children to appreciate time before their own birth.
1. Individual activity
o On an empty line, order the events of an ordinary day.
o On an empty line, order the significant events of their lives.
Go back further, beyond their own lives:
o On an empty line, place where you would put your birth and that of your parents and grandparents.
Compare timelines and discuss with the children the problems of comparison. You might like to use the PowerPoint entitled Timelines*, in the activity unit Timelines, for help with these tasks.
2. Whole class activity
Build a timeline
Either draw one manually or use the simple Class Timeline* templates in the Timelines activity unit. These are the same timeline template, one as a PowerPoint document, with each screen containing a timeline template covering one thousand years; the other is a Word document.
To complete the entire timeline, print out the timeline for each thousand years, and stick together (for the Word document you’ll first have to cut the paper into six slices) so that you have a continuous timeline, and then either roll up or pin to the wall.
Build a timeline reaching back, not to your grandparents, or even to their grandparents; not a hundred years, nor even a thousand years – but to 4000 BC!
The basic divisions for this timeline should be hundreds of years.
How many hundred years is on the timeline? (Remember to add the 2000 years AD to the 4000 years BC!)
Mark on where BC turns into AD.
(If you have Muslims in class it would be good to mark on the Muslim calendar division as well – but the software uses the standard European calendar.)
Where would the pupils’ birthdays be on the timeline?
Mark in, approximately, the earliest date from the previous family timelines (i.e. the date of the birth of the oldest grandparent or great grandparent of the class pupils).
History is about filling up the rest!
Discuss key dates with the children, based on their previous knowledge. This will then form the basis of further work and will be a valuable classroom resource.
A note about timelines
We are going to return to this timeline at regular intervals. However, do remember that timelines are valuable aids, not the be all and end all of history – not even in developing a sense of chronology. Chronology is valueless if it is simply a list of dates and events. It has to be rooted in a living sense of history, of a feel for the past, of how and why things changed and the links between periods and societies.
There are some superb timelines on the web – to be found at the free history site, www.historyworld.net, for example. These can be invaluable as reference sources. However, in some quarters there seems to be an idea that history = timelines. Over-use of timelines can reinforce a dry, lifeless version of history as simply a succession of facts and dates – history as general knowledge, or even history as trivia.
The approach we have taken is that timelines are created or filled in by the children themselves, from knowledge gained in using the Interactive Map of World History and other sources. The use of timelines is therefore simply as a reinforcement tool, one way of distilling and setting down the information they have acquired in a brief and manageable way.
* This is only available to customers who have purchased Interactive Map of World History
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