Events on a timeline can span a day or years.
Timelines are a visual representation of chronological events. Timelines are a learning and teaching tool that reinforce the concepts of sequencing, cause and effect and linear relationships. Students can make timelines based on their own lives, focused on the life of a famous person or about a historical time period such as the Civil War or Westward expansion. Teachers can use timelines to help visual learners picture events in history and place dates in relation to other events in history.
Instructions
1. Assign a topic for the timeline. You may wish for your students to create an biographical timeline, representing their own lives or a historical figure's life, or a historical timeline, representing a period of history.
2. Ask your students to list the important events they wish to include on their timelines. Help them choose which events are important, and have the students order the events chronologically.
3. Tape a piece of butcher paper to the board or wall to model the process of drawing a timeline for your students.
4. Have each student lay out a piece of butcher paper either horizontally or vertically, depending on which way he'd like his timeline to be.
5. Use a ruler to draw a straight line down the center of your butcher paper, and have the students do the same.
6. Ask each student to asses the span of time their events cover. Will they be measuring days, months or years? How many?
7. Demonstrate draw evenly spaced increments on to the timeline using a ruler. For example, if a student's timeline is measuring one year, she will need 12 evenly spaced increments to represent each month. Measure equal space between each month with a ruler, marking each increment with a dot.
8. Help the students measure out the increments on their timelines.
9. Demonstrate place events along the timeline, placing tick marks where the event falls and then writing a brief description of the event on the timeline.
10. Help students place their events on their timelines. Have them write the events in pencil first and then trace over in marker when they are sure the events are properly placed.
11. Ask the students to illustrate the timelines and add a title. Students may wish to use cutout pictures or create their own images to signify each event.
Tags: butcher paper, their timelines, your students, each month, each student, evenly spaced, evenly spaced increments
