I am a visual learner. I love the maps in the backs of fantasy books so I can picture the world the author has created. I love handling math manipulatives so I can see exactly how large 1/5ths is compared to 3/8ths. I have to draw things out when I’m explaining the layout of a house, directions to the museum, or the bookcase I want to build.
And I love time lines.
One thing that drew me to Sonlight a couple of years ago was their Book of Time and the cool blackline stickers that came with it. However, that cool book has sat, largely unused on our school room shelf for the past two years. Why? Well, I think for us me, a time line in a book isn’t quite the same as a big long time line that you can take in at a glance.
My mom had one that wrapped around the school room, but I don’t have the space (I do, but my letter cards take it up). So when I saw this idea, I pounced on it. We already owned A Child’s History of the World so I took the book to our print shop and asked them to blow up the ‘staircase of time’ as large as they could. We were limited in size by their laminator, but I think it’ll work just fine. Here’s how it turned out:
The other problem we had with the Book of Time was how hard it was to find the sticker / figure we were looking for. Sonlight sends them on cool sticker paper so you can color them, cut them out, and just stick them in your book — but with the sticker sheets stapled together and filed away, I’d forget to use them, or if I remembered it seemed some important people and items were missing altogether. We wrote some things in on our time line, but it honestly never occurred to my little pea brain that we might print out or draw some of our own characters. *slaps head*
This year, I thought I’d print some of our own (Hannah’s Home School Helps on Yahoo has a lot of ready-to-go printables for time lines) and take the time to organize all the images chronologically in a binder so we could see what we needed quickly.
I had a few plastic pocket sleeves left over from my Coupon Organizer that I thought would work well. Regular old baseball card holders would work fine, too. I placed the pocket organizers in an old binder I had on hand, and filled it up with our time line images organized from oldest to most recent.
HOORAY. I don’t know if we’ll use them all (and we have some duplicates), but I’m thrilled with the ‘at a glance’ time line hanging on the wall (it’s in front of our cold storage door that gets used infrequently – I’m pinched for wall space thanks to the chalkboard wall), and even happier with the time line images organized and easy to find.
Here’s a video from the lady who created the free Charlotte Mason LDS Curriculum we’re using this year. She explains the time line and history books (Charlotte called them Century Books) – though I’m sad the video cuts off the books and notebooks she is trying to show, it does tell you how to use the time line:
Here’s the video on on her site with more information on the Family History Rotation. We’re trying this out this year, wish us luck — I love the idea of reading, charting on the time line, and then using our history notebooks to draw and write about what we just read.
(This was supposed to post automatically while we were out of town. Whoops!)
