Elementary students can create timelines about historical or personal events.
Timelines are a teaching tool that can help elementary school students put events in chronological perspective. Any event can be placed into a sequence of time -- from sequences that span hundreds of years to ones that span days or weeks. Timelines can describe world-changing historical events or events of the everyday, personal variety. Show kids create a timeline that relates to a history lesson or their own life events.
School Year Timeline
Introduce your classroom to the idea of the usefulness of a timeline by starting the school year by posting a timeline for your classroom. Begin with a blank timeline and add important dates along with your class, allowing them to participate in choosing which dates are "important" enough to make the cut for this school year timeline. Use the timeline to mark dates like the first day of school, Christmas vacation, spring break and the last day of school. Then add other dates such as school holidays or school or grade-wide testing dates. Discuss with your classroom why some dates and events "make the cut" and others don't. Explain to them how this relates to studying historical timelines and significant events.
"On This Day in History" Timeline
Choose a date for students to research and find out what "important" events throughout history happened on the selected date. Allow students the opportunity to research and record any and all events that they consider important that happened on the chosen day. You might want to do some "pre" research before assigning a particular date to ensure that they will easily find a few events of significance. Have the students bring their research collection of events to class and hand out copies of blank timelines. Have the students offer their findings and note each event on the blackboard. Give the students time to individually create their own timeline from all the proposed events, selecting between five and 10 events that they consider to be the most important.
"Life So Far" Timeline
Assign each student the task of creating an individual time line of his life called "Life So Far." This timeline should record the most significant events that they have experienced so far, so limit the number that they can place on the timeline to five or 10. Have each student present his timeline to the class, explaining why these particular events were selected. Discuss with your class how easy or difficult they found it to present the significant events of their lives by selecting only a few choices.
Historical Events Timeline
Ask your students to create a timeline that records historical events they are studying. If your class is studying Ancient Greece, have them create a timeline of Greek government. For American history lessons, have the students create a timeline of European explorers who "found" different parts of the Americas. Make sure to assign them a span of time within which their selected events should fall, and point out to them that the longer the span of time covered, the more significant the events listed should be. Have each student present her timeline of events to the class.
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