A Timeline of History Made Easy With Timeline Figures
One subject that kids love to learn about, especially when it is studied in an interactive way, is history. By doing a quick search, you will quickly realize there are many ways to approach history, especially for those who homeschool. You have choices regarding what materials you’ll use, when you’ll cover various time periods and even how hands-on you’ll be.
As the one who is responsible for teaching my girls history, I have to admit that I like to do things in order. This is why we learn history chronologically in our home school. And because I want to make history as fun and engaging as I can, I love to include a lot of hands-on activities into our lessons.
My family uses timelines to study the timeline of history. I don’t know if you are aware, but there are A LOT of years to cover in history! Timelines help us see how people and events are intertwined, and give us a way to plot out what is going on during the period of history we happen to be studying.
When we learn a new fact, date or personal story, we add it to its place on the timeline which gives us an easy picture of where it fits with everything else we had studied. For my tactile, visual learners, timelines are a great addition to our history lessons.
My children love using our History Through the Ages Historical Timeline Figures by Home School in the Woods. Written, designed and drawn by Amy Pak, these figures are simply stunning.
You can check out another product from HSITW that is great for history fans, Time Travelers Series, that Susan reviewed.
The timeline figures come in printed form or on a CD. I enjoy being able to print off figures as we are studying them, so I use the CD version. I can not only choose what to print, but I can also choose its size (wall size or notebook size) and with our without some historical text included.
You can also purchase History Through the Ages “Record of Time.” This timeline notebook also comes either in CD format or in a beautiful 12” x 9” hard cover 3-ring binder. This is a wonderful way to organize your timeline figures, while providing a journal for recording history.
How do we use the timeline figures in our history education?
As we are studying specific people and events that I want my kids to remember, I print off the figures that we’ll need. The girls use their creativity to color them while they tell me about the person or event they’re working with. This is a great way to build in review. Then they figure out where it belongs on the timeline.
Our timeline is displayed on our wall. This helps us regularly refer to it to get a visual guide to our history lessons. An additional benefit is that it gives my husband an easy way to engage the girls about what they are learning. He can quickly see when new figures have been added to our timeline and when he sees new figures, he asks the girls to tell him all about them.