Timeline of History
Goals: to develop a sense of historical perspective by seeing the relationship of events in time, to become familiar with logarithmic scales.
Project: When studying history, it is important to grasp not just the sequence of related events but also how separate narratives relate to each other in time.
In this project, students created a master timeline using clothesline and clothespins, strung around the room to record the events we studied during the year.
One challenge in building a useful timeline is that a linear scale will not show all ancient history and sufficient detail of the recent past at the same time. In math, students were reviewing exponents, powers of ten, and scientific notation, and becoming familiar with graphing calculators. By extending these skills, students planned a square timeline with one side for the current decade, a second side for the 20th century, a third side for the previous millenium, and a fourth side going back 10,000 years. As you move back in time, each year gets a little smaller, providing great detail in the recent past, but also showing all of history.
Students attached paper date markers with clothespins. During the year, historical events could be pinned to the timeline. While studying immigration at the time of the 2006 immigrant rights
protests, students made paper chains to represent major waves of immigration into the United States.
As a correlary activity, students worked in groups to make temporary linear timelines of the history of planet earth stretching 50 meters down the hallways. They marked events such as the formation of the moon, the beginning of life, the invention of sexual reproduction, and the rise and fall of the dinosaurs. At this scale, all of human history, as shown on our classroom timeline, was thinner than a human hair.