Intro to Wall Timelines
by
Beth Harvey
Have you ever attempted to create a Wall Timeline? All of the questions are overwhelming: Where to begin? How long should it be? Should I do it to scale? And then, the most overwhelming question of all--which of the hundreds of important dates should I put on it!?
I have spent the last 16 years of homeschooling dealing with these questions. My sons and I have made several different timelines. Each time we moved (which was almost every 2 years!) we put away the timeline, and started over again. I was trying to make it more effective as a visual aid. They always got so cluttered and busy—because I tried to put every important piece of information on it.
Since it was such a burden to make all the decisions myself of which items to include, I was always looking for a kit or pre-made timeline that I could use effectively. But the few that I found were not satisfactory. My biggest objection was that they didn't show the whole sweep of history to scale. The closer to contemparary times we came the more width was given, and so it did not give us an accurate perspective.
My goal this past year has been to develop a plan for a wall timeline that is useful as a visual aid, therefore, it needs to be to scale. Otherwise you miss one of the most important aspects of this tool: seeing the relative lengths of the eras. Most timelines I've seen have given up on making the timeline with a consistent scale, because it's just not practical! But we benefited so much from this aspect of our timeline that I've been working hard on a plan that would enable you to do it effectively. What is needed is an over simplified wall timeline.
Why is there a need for an "over simplified" Wall Timeline?
Since homeschoolers are reviving the study of history and doing it earlier and earlier, we end up studying historical ages up close, getting lots of details about the events. But there is no curricula that sums it all up for the dialectic age students who needs to start putting together the whole, to see the relationships of the various eras, etc.
I've seen a tendency among homeschoolers to skip this stage of learning and go from the stories of elementary years to the rhetorical analysis of something like Omnibus from Veritas Press. But I feel that we are skipping a very important step. Students are lost in a morass of details-- fascinating ones— but they need to come up for air, and step back and see the sweeping picture. I saw this problem in our own homeschool.
When a student begins to study history seriously at around age twelve it is important that they understand the "Major Eras" and the key dates that make the turning points for these eras. What I've started to develop is a plan for making a wall timeline with just the Key Events in bold and then room below them to add a few extra events that you might study. What follows is my rough idea. It's still a plan in the making! I hope this can help you in your study of history.
©2007 Elisabeth W. Harvey