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Timeline activity National Curriculum aims: To know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day To gain historical perspective by placing knowledge into different contexts (short- and long-term timescales) To understand how history is represented in different ways Learning objectives: Children can organise events into chronological order. They understand that many parts of modern life are recent and would not be part of our ancestor’s experience. As this has been made for KS1 the dates are all AD, but more cards could be added to demonstrate earlier dates or specific events relating to different topics. Activity: How do we say 2017? Practise saying this date – twenty seventeen but also two thousand and seventeen. Explain both are correct. We say twenty seventeen as it is quicker and shows we are talking about a date; but two thousand and seventeen is also correct because the year is a number. To make a number line we look at the number and put them in order with the smallest on the left and largest on the right. Put children into groups and give each child an individual card. There are 33 cards so some cards could be used to model putting them into order. Children work together putting their cards into chronological order. Why have you put them in that order? Explain. Once all cards are in the correct order look at spacing between cards. How many years are there between each card? Model working out the gap between cards by counting on, or subtracting dates depending on which methods children are most comfortable with. Note the number of years between events/cards on post-its between each card. Is the number of years between each card the same? Explain that on a timeline gaps should reflect how long has passed between each event, so if it has been a bigger amount of time the gap between cards should be bigger. Ask children to arrange cards to reflect this idea.
