Homeschooling - Making a History Timeline DIY

Believe it or not, that is one segment of a homemade history timeline that our family made during the years we homeschooled the kids (21 years in all!)  The photos below are not in order, and are only a few segments of the timeline, but they give you a general idea of what we did to construct our history timeline.

So why make your own timeline when there are others available for purchase? After all, it's a lot easier to hit the 'Buy Now' button than it is to do the work of actually cutting out pictures and making date tags.

I had seen history timelines that could be purchased, ready to place on a wall. I had also seen timelines that were in book form. BUT it seemed to me that it would be much more helpful to the learning process if we could actually make our own timeline, putting up adding machine tape in rows (7 in all) across  two adjacent walls in our school room, and adding our own tags and pictures.

As we studied something, we would cut pictures out of old National Geographics we got from library sales (not touching their duplicates which sat on our bookshelves), and would staple tags onto the wall. So yes, we still have the bookshelf that contains about 18 linear feet of those yellow-covered magazines.

I'm sure that now we could simply go online and find all the pictures we needed, could download them and print them out. Things have come a long way since we started homeschooling all those years ago.

You can see that the timeline was pretty beaten up by the time our homeschooling years were over. These photos were taken after the homeschooling years, just before I reluctantly removed the timeline from the walls. Of all the objects I used for homeschooling, the timeline we'd made ourselves was the most difficult to part with. At least I have the photos, as long as Carbonite doesn't let me down.

I think some tags fell off this one.

The colored ribbons were stapled from one date to another to indicate the years covered by the reign of that particular monarch.

As I said before, these are not in order. But you will notice that in the years B.C., the dates on the adding machine tape were much closer together than they were between A.D. 1500 and A.D. 1600, for example. We had a lot more information for that time period and needed more space in which to place our pictures and tags. Still, once we went to a wider spacing, we kept that uniform for the remainder of the timeline.

Evidently that poor guy lost his right foot during the Plague that struck London in 1665. A plague and a fire. Why is this making me want to visit England again??

Yes, we did study American history, and those lines ran beneath this timeline, concurrently, so that you could see, for example, what was going on in the world at the time that Jamestown Colony was being established.

Aside:  When Jamestown was established, by the way, Pandy Inn in Dorstone, Herefordshire, had already been a free house for 500 years - and still is. But that wasn't on our timeline.

Pandy Inn, Twelfth Century Free House

Dorstone

Did you notice with what little encouragement my brain turns to England?? It's pathetic, isn't it!

By the way, it's a great idea to make a timeline even if your kids aren't in school at home. It's a fun project for everyone involved, it's inexpensive, and it's a very effective learning tool.

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