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The Armchair Academic Timeline on a Budget |
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This page was last updated on: March 30, 2002
My husband worked in a book store, so I asked him to bring home some unused light-weight cardboard, either white or just a plain color. I used a stencil to put the dates in on each end of each strip. Then came the problem. I am not an artist, so where was I going to get good, small pictures of the people that we read about to put on the timeline? With the Konos timeline, you order a set of pictures for scientists, one for musicians, etc - so to have a picture for everyone you study or read about begins to cost $$. I mulled it over, and kept an eye out for something that might work. One day I was in a second-hand bookstore, and found the perfect thing: a complete 18 volume set of "Art Linkletter's Picture Encyclopedia for Boys and Girls". It has pictures of scientists, explorers, musicians, people from the Bible, etc. We have been using this set for over a year now and have only encountered 2 people that we couldn't find a picture for in this set. I bought the 18 volume set for about $8. As we are reading/studying, each person we come across, we look up their picture (and sometimes there will be pictures of a person in more than one place, so I went through the entire set and cross-referenced all the pictures, so we can cut out a picture that does not destroy whoever is on the back side of a page). I have been truly surprised to learn that Columbus, Martin Luther and Copernicus were contemporaries! I vaguely thought that Copernicus was centuries before Columbus. When we put new people on the time line, one of the kids often comments on who else was living at the same time, and they sometimes ask if the people would have known each other. We also try to read biographies to bring these people and events into focus. We enjoyed reading about Thomas Edison, who was kicked out of school for asking too many questions, so his mother went to the school, got the books, and homeschooled him! He kept his science experiments in the basement and labeled everything "Poison" so that his many siblings would leave his things alone. My sons laughed at this, and have told other people about it, so I know they are remembering what we read. We have our timeline on a wall in the living room. It is quite a conversation piece. Friends who visit us from time to time can see what we are studying as new faces appear on the timeline. I used the small wallet-size portrait of our two sons and put those on the timeline as well so the boys can see where they fit in. This system has worked great for us. |
Our two sons sitting by the most recent centuries... the time period we have read the most about. |
I don't remember much from my school history classes except reading about boring things that happened a long time ago. As I prepared for homeschooling, reading everything I could, I realized that the dates and events I "learned" about in school didn't mean much to me because they weren't in any sort of context. We read about US history, then we'd be told about some scientist inventing something, but they were totally separated subjects. I came across the idea of a timeline from looking at Konos, a unit study. I thought their idea was really neat, but it was definitely out of my price range! They use strips of colored heavy paper (such as poster board) and each strip represents one century, beginning with 2000 BC. |
"Nothing puts history in perspective quite like a timeline. The benefits of using a timeline throughout your school year parallel those of using outline maps. It's fascinating and sometimes shocking to discover familiar historical events occurred during the same time period or didn't occur as closely in time as you'd thought. It's common to teach history in neat, little packaged topics. Missing from the picture, however, is both chronology and a clear understanding regarding how one nation's events affected the history of another. Using timelines faithfully, fills in that gap." -Maggie Hogan & Cindy Wiggers The Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide |
A timeline displayed on your walls is quite a conversation piece! |