The Primary English Encyclopedia: The Heart of the Curriculum, Third Edition
See also diagrams, history and English
Timelines are vertical or horizontal representations of a journey through time. They can cover a thousand years or the events of a day or even an hour. They always involve careful selection of what to include and what to leave out. Events can be denoted by words or by pictures or both.
In English lessons we often chart a journey of a character or characters through time, for example the journey through war torn Europe to find their parents of the children in Ian Serraillier’s The Silver Sword.
Children enjoy making timelines of fantasy characters like the Jumblies (see Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense, Dragon’s World Publishers) using words and perhaps some illustrations bringing English and art together.
Timelines are most often used in history lessons to show the events of a monarch’s reign or the movement of a people through the centuries across the globe. In preparation for the millennium many teachers and children constructed their own timelines of the past 1,000 years. During 1999 The Times Educational Supplement kept in touch with the work of many schools and noted that many of the timelines constructed by children in the UK included key events: the coming of the Normans in Britain, building of Notre Dame Cathedral, the arrival of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, Art Deco images of the 1920s and 30s, the technology revolution of the present day. However children did not echo adult views of history and some of the liveliest most interesting timelines showed an emphasis on their own regional, ethnic and religious communities. Some children concentrated on music, sport or environmental issues and developments.
Choices had to be made from all the possibilities and children learnt that for a project like this
you have to select, as all historians do, when telling the story of the past. In one school I visit often children in each year group were responsible for a particular period of time or aspect, the youngest children taking up aspects of the present or recent past.
The talk, discussion and writing involved linked history, English and art in fruitful ways.
From TES … Florence Nightingale Timelines (www.drai.com/-bomeo/nightingale/index.html) One of many hundreds of timelines on the Internet with a focus on Nightingale as the first modern war nurse. Illuminates her particular qualities and abilities which made possible her great contribution.
This is the complete article, containing 396 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
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