History Timeline

One of the things that has been a work in progress in our little homeschool is our attempt to learn history. We have had a couple of different approaches and it has changed over the course of the last couple of years. With Nature Girl we started using a spiral bound Century Notebook. And I liked that. It worked well. We would add everything we were reading about whether it was a composer, an artist or a person or event from history. But, with the addition of Little Mama to our homeschool, I wanted something that all the kids could do and see together. (The one consistent thing we have done is learn history through great literature! We have read great books such as The Little Duke and Our Island Story.)

Like everything we do for homeschool we get great ideas from other places. One of my favorite homeschool websites is http://higherupandfurtherin.blogspot.com/. She does a timeline on her wall using yarn, push pins and color coded index cards to indicate heritage such as Greek, European, Hebrew etc. We get our history figures from Homeschooling in the Woods (little cutout pictures of people and events). Each girl colors the picture and glues it on the appropriate colored index card. We then make a big deal about placing it on the timeline that is push pinned to the wall.

We talk about other events happening around that time. Who else was born, what else was invented, if there was a battle taking place. Last week Little Mama and I read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" out of Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare for Children. And for science we learned about the Galileo thermometer. So this week Little Mama colored a picture of William Shakespeare and Galileo Galilei. We looked at the dates of each of their births and deaths and realized that Shakespeare and Galileo were born in the same year. We also learned that Shakespeare died many years before Galileo. Little Mama was the one who figured that out. She is very intrigued as to when people are born and when they die - how old they are.) I explained to Little Mama that those two men would be considered contemporaries. We also recognized that one was English the other Italian. So, we looked at our globe and discussed the continent of Europe and where Italy is and where England is.

One of the things I wanted to do was incorporate Biblical History within learning World History. I want the kids to understand that the events that have taken place in the Bible are a part of history as a whole. And to be able to see how Biblical History intertwines with other historical events in the world. At first I thought I needed some fancy book or program. But after taking a deep breath and giving it some prayer a very simple idea came to me (I know it probably isn't original.) This year we are starting to read through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. I purchased a packet of pictures of events that took place BC and we are going to color them, put them on a colored card and add them to our history timeline along with the other history we are reading about. ALL of history will be on our timeline in our schoolroom for everyone to look at all the time.

We are learning (and I say we because I am learning so much as well) history, geography, science, literature, grammar and sometimes math all at once . . .