I did not understand the true power of a timeline until we put one on the wall of our dining room. For 2 years the giant timeline adorned the wall around our table. The place where we gathered to eat three meals a day was filled with pictures of people and events we had read about in our study of American history. The pictures filled little minds afresh each time we gathered there to eat or work on school work that required the use of that table.
 

It was a wonderful two years of learning. Every evening the children would rehearse for Daddy what they had learned about that day. At lunchtime, they would tell me about something they remembered from weeks earlier. All their learning was constantly being reinforced. This was mostly unprompted. It just spilled out of them when they saw those pictures. A home educating momma's dream. 
 

Since it's Back-to-School time, I thought I would share with you how I made our beloved timeline.

 

 

Young children are very literal. Understanding the concept of 100 years ago or 1000 years ago is difficult. For this reason, I really like to make the timeline a very real representation of the passing of time as much as I can. Some timelines have 10 years per page for recent history, 25 years per page as you get farther back, and on down to 100 years per page for ancient history. Sure, we don't have as many events to fill those pages, and so it makes sense to condense the pages. However, I'm not sure that it communicates the passage of time to young children very well. This is why I set out to portray the number of years in the same way on each page. I knew this would make our timeline big, but history is big, right?

 

I bought a package of graph paper and armed myself with a permanent marker. I turned the paper sideways so that the long side of the paper would be the top and bottom of the timeline. I had hoped that this would mean that I would be able to use fewer sheets of graph paper to achieve the length that I would need for the timeline. Wrong. I ended up running out of room for pictures, so I taped additional sheets of graph paper to the top and bottom of the timeline.
 

In the center of the graph paper I used my wide permanent marker to make the long line that would represent time. Each square running along this line would represent one year. This made it very clear and easy for the children to understand. They can relate to one year~ birthday to birthday.
 

I put a thinner line every ten squares and labeled it with the year. This way, the beginning of each decade was labeled. When the line said "1870," they could easily count the lines and find that the tenth line was "1880." This was the second time of using the timeline in the picture, so you can't really see the graph paper lines anymore, but I promise they used to be there.

 

When we put a figure on the timeline, we would draw an arrow from the picture to the line for the year that the event took place. You can see in the picture on the left how we incorporated the arrows. If you look closely, you can see that when an event spanned for many years, we put arrows for the beginning and end of the timeframe. Have a look at the arrows for the building of the Erie canal. Don't look too closely, though, or you'll see all the dirt! Toddlers and preschoolers like to point at the timeline during meals. I guess that's a good thing.
 

I used Sonlight's Timeline Figures for our timeline. They are pre-gummed, so the children can just cut out and stick them to the timeline. Or they can color them first. The only problem is that we always like to put more items on the timeline than Sonlight incorporates in their figures.For the extra items, I search online for an image that I like to represent the event/person/book. I paste those images into Excel, make them the size that I want, and print.

 

With Sonlight, Cores 3 and higher coordinate the History, Readers, and Read-Alouds so that all of your reading is from the same time period. Because it's all woven together so beautifully, I wanted to put our Readers and Read-Alouds on our timeline as well. These books really give the children a feel for what it was like to live at that period of time, even when the characters were fictional. They relate to the characters! I wanted to capitalize on that, so I found images of the book covers to include on the timeline. These figures ran along the top edge of our timeline, and I was always sure to emphasize which characters were real and which were fictional. Directly under the line of readers and read-alouds, we put a picture of each of the Presidents of the US. We placed them on the line according to their times in office. This really gave us a framework of what was happening during each President's time in office.

 

Since children are very literal and timelines are very abstract, there was one more item that I wanted to incorporate into our timeline: us. We put our family on our timeline! We put the grandparents, Daddy, Momma, and all the children on our timeline. I just wrote our names and birth years on the timeline. This year when I start a new one with my 8 year old, I will put a picture of each of us on the line instead.
 

Having grandparents and parents on the timeline gave recent history a different feeling for the children. It was a long time ago, but knowing that an event happened while their grandparent was alive really gave the children an understanding of how much the world has changed in such a short time. It also gave them things that they wanted to ask their grandparents and great grandparents about. It was wonderful fuel for discussions!
 

The key to making timelines really useful for your children is making certain that you use them and talk about them. Make them meaningful to your children in some way rather than a book that you label with dates and put back on the shelf. Timelines are a fabulous way to cement history in the minds of young learners. Don't be afraid to be creative and find a way to make it work for your family!
 

How have you made timelines work at your house?

 

More on timelines:

On File Folders

On Cardstock