Combining a History Timeline and World Map

Posted on October 24, 2012 By Carrie Leave a Comment
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One of the things that I knew I wanted to do this year was a history timeline to help develop an overall picture of how history has unfolded. It seems like we learn history in pieces and have a hard time piecing together events and how they might have affected each other, so my hope was that a timeline would help both me and my 7yo (and perhaps even my 5yo to a certain extent).

We do school in our dining room and have very little storage space. I don’t like having our school stuff out in the open – too “homeschool-y” for me. :) (Then again, we do have a globe and a US map in our living room as decor!) So, we couldn’t do a timeline on the wall, which seems like it would be the best solution to really get the whole picture.

So for now, I decided to just laminate a page for each segment of history and keep it in a notebook. When we do our timeline stuff (probably once every week or two), we just pull out the pages and put them in order. (Our timeline is just in 1000-year increments right now, but once we get into A.D. we will probably do 100-year increments.)

I wanted to get a sense of not just when in history things happened, but where. So, we’re taking the images that we’re using on the timeline and making them much smaller, and then placing them on a large map in the place that they happened:

I’m really excited about how it’s working – it’s definitely been good for all of us to see where history happened! I know that we’ll soon be putting timeline stickers on top of timeline stickers, but in a way, I think that will be part of helping us learn how civilization has developed. (In fact, the Fertile Crescent is already pretty full of events overlapping each other!)

Part of me wants to blast through history as fast as we can to fill up the map because I love it so much! :) Do you use a timeline or map to help solidify what you’ve learned in history class?

Here’s what we are using for history this year: