Category: History

November 7, 2012 History, Our Homeschool 1 Comment

DIY Wall Timeline Tutorial

A long while back I wrote about wanting to create some sort of masterpiece of a timeline to hang on my  dining room wall. I promised to update with pictures when I’d done so, but I just didn’t. The conversation has come up recently in a number of homeschooling circles, so I am finally sharing my finished product with some pictures and helpful hints.

Without further ado, I give you our timeline:

Do you see the size of that bad boy? It’s 5 feet long and 3ft 4inches tall. It dominates the room and is, sadly, the most attractive thing in the room. Aside from maybe the pink Christmas tree. Which was a Halloween tree and will become a “Saint Tree” and then a Jesse Tree before heading upstairs to do it’s job as a Christmas tree in the kids’ room when the time comes. But I digress.
I’m a bit proud of my timeline. It’s not a great work of art, but it is much more attractive than many of the timelines I’ve seen. And in fact, it’s much more attractive than the first one I attempted: 
Here’s a bad picture of my ugly timeline.
Now, as I mentioned in my first post on the subject, I’ve accepted that my house will scream “we homeschool,” but I still just couldn’t bare looking at that every night at dinner. So I went back to the drawing board. I think I wandered aimless around Dollar Tree looking for inspiration when I was struck with the idea of using ribbon. I didn’t find any suitable ribbon at Dollar Tree and ended up at Michael’s. 
I wandered around Michael’s looking for any sort of round sticker to use for the year markers. I was shocked that I was completely unable to find appropriately sized round stickers. But I saw those giant hole punch things and realized that it was actually cheaper to invest in one of those and make my own “stickers” out of craft paper and glue. And I got a new toy out of the deal. 
If you want to make a timeline like this one, here’s what you need.
  • 4 sheets of foam board, 30in X 20in (I got mine at the Dollar Tree)
  • Duct Tape
  • Contact paper in a pattern you don’t hate – enough to cover the foam board. I also got this at the Dollar Tree.
  • 40 feet of narrow ribbon
  • a craft punch in a shape you like
  • a ruler
  • a sharpie
  • glue – you’re going to have to buy good glue designed to glue ribbon. I used something called Embellishment Glue in stick form. I tried using school glue and a glue gun and both were a disaster. Invest in the glue. Trust me.

The first step is to tape the 4 sheets of foam board together using Duct Tape. Then flip the whole huge board over and cover it with contact paper. It helps to have help with this step unless you’re the kind of person who likes to be alone when you’re frustrated and trying to wrestle giant sheets of sticky paper.

The next step was the hardest for me, but I’ve done the hard work (the math) for you, so just follow my lead. Lay out 8 rows of the ribbon. You can be anal and measure to evenly space it, or you can just wing it like I did. I intentionally crowded it toward the top where I figure we’ll have fewer dates to add and spaced it further toward the bottom where I figure we’ll have more to add. 

The next hardest part is getting the rows straight. Once I decided where I wanted the ribbon, I marked it on one side, measured it’s distance from the top and then measured that out on the other side and laid it across. I tried all kinds of crazy things to get the ribbon straight. I hung a string from a weight and tried to get gravity to help me get it straight. . . You just have to decide how crazy you want to be about it.

See the black line? That’s there’s one in the same place on the other side. That’s how I got the ribbon straight.
The glue I used. This worked great and wasn’t messy.

Once you’ve got the ribbon on, the hard part is over. The rest is just tedious.

Take your punch and punch out approximately 18,000 punches.

Now you’re going to write years on them as so:

  • For the years 5000 BC to 2000 BC, write every 200 years (5000, 4800, 4600, etc.)
  • For the years 2000 BC to year 0, write every 100 years (2000, 1900, 1800, etc.)
  • For the years 0 – 1600 AD, write every 100 years
  • For the years 1600 – 1850, write every 25 years
  • For the years 1850 – 2020 write every 10 years

A side note for the anal retentive (like me): No, this doesn’t give a totally accurate depiction of the passage of time. However. You want this to fit on your wall. And you want room for all of the big events that happened in modern history without leaving huge chunks empty in the ancient past. This is also why I spaced the rows further apart as I moved down the timeline. You’re free to arrange your years anyway you want, but then you’ll have to do your own math.

I went up through the year 2020 because I want to add stuff to this as we go forward, and I plan to leave it up forever.

Okay, now you’re ready to stick all of these on. Use the same glue as before and, starting with 2020 and working backwards, space as follows:

  • 2020 to the year 0, one marker every 8 inches (measure from the middle of one to the middle of the other)
  • year 0 to 5000 BC, one marker every 3 inches

There. Now you’re done. Stand back and admire your handiwork!

Since I’m really committed to this timeline, I stuck it to my wall using that double sided foam tape stuff. It’s not going anywhere. In fact, I want to paint the room and I think I’m just going to paint around it. I’m afraid I can’t get it down without destroying it.

All you have to do now is add the history. I made a template in Pages where I can just drag and drop images from Google Images into the template and then print, cut and laminate. I happen to have scored a laminator at Goodwill on half price day for a grand total of $4.50. So I get to laminate. But you can use packing tape if you’re not as lucky in your thrifting as I am.

One of the reasons I wanted to make my own timeline is because I wanted to decide what goes on it. I wanted to be able to add important family events.

We also add the historical novels we read.

And whatever else we happen to take a fancy in.

We’ve had our timeline up for more than a year now, and it’s not as fleshed out as I had hoped, but that is due at least in part to the fact that I seem to always be missing either printer ink, double stick tape, or laminate/packing tape. So I guess that’s one drawback of doing it yourself. Another is that it is a pretty big project, but hopefully the mistakes I made will make your efforts easier. I really am proud of this. And it really is a great conversation starter – both for family dinners and for anyone who comes to our home. I had high hopes when I made it, and I think, so far, it’s delivering what I’d hoped it would.

November 13, 2011 History, Homeschool Science, Our Homeschool 2 Comments

Greeks and Zombies

My kids have been up to some interesting stuff. Really interesting stuff. Like self designed experiments in which they come to the conclusion that the only way to kill a zombie is to crush his brain. Here is Henry with his cup of zombie brains.

Helen’s experiment was about rotten eggs. Apparently if you leave eggs out for weeks they become really stinky.

Henry has also developed a deep interest in Ancient Greece. I believe it was sparked by our new routine of picking up Little Caesar’s Pizza after his enrichment program on Tuesdays. He really likes the costumes of the period.

Here he is as “A Greek.”

Here he is as a Greek sculptor working on a “huge statue.” That’s an olive leaf wreath on his head. He designed it himself.

Here is his “Acropolis”

Here are the Olympians wrestling. The women have been kicked out since they weren’t allowed to watch the original games. But he did later decide those rules were stupid and let them join in.

I don’t have any pictures of him dressed as Zeus hurling lightning bolts at Athens.

It’s occurred to me while watching Henry do this self-directed unit study that “self-directed” really, truly, is the key to learning this sort of stuff. I never told him to build an acropolis out of blocks. I never suggested he might use his tinker toys as lightning bolts or to create Poseidon’s trident.

I remember being asked to do such things in school in an effort to make the learning “meaningful” and “hands on.” But it wasn’t “meaningful” because I usually didn’t care too much about what we were learning about. Which sucks because now, I wish I’d learned more. I don’t wish that I’d “paid more attention in school,” I wish that I’d retained more. I think Henry will retain a lot more about Ancient Greece than I ever did simply because he’s learning about it at a point when he asked to learn about it. And he’s learning it in a way that is truly meaningful for him because he’s designing the learning tasks. Another kid might want to do detailed drawings of an acropolis or write stories about the gods. I love that my kids have the freedom to learn in ways that work for them.

August 24, 2011 History, Our Homeschool 2 Comments

Dreaming of Timelines

One of the biggest “gaps” in my own education is in my understanding of history. It was never presented to me in a way that I could wrap my brain around. I still struggle with seeing the big picture. So I’ve become obsessed with creating a big picture of history. Literally. I want to make a wall timeline.

At first I envisioned something like this:

Isn’t that cool? I’ve been racking my brain for where in the world to put something like this in my house. I even found a lovely free printable timeline at a fellow homeschooler’s site, GuestHollow.com. Just the A.D. part of it is 70 pages. I did the math. I would need about 50 linear feet of wall space. I don’t have that.

The Guest Hollow timeline is meant to be put in a notebook. It’s awesome for that. Notebook timelines are great, but my brain needs to see the big picture. The whole picture. All at once.

So then I came across this:

It goes up one side for the years before Christ, and then comes back down the other side for the years Anno Domini. The one pictured above came from this squidoo page. It’s published by Konos and comes with the printed pictures.

This is perfect. This gives the big picture. Of course, I’m not willing to shell out the cash for the premade timeline. And I’m not terribly interested in what someone else thinks I should put on the timeline. So I’m going to make my own. Other people have done it.

Here’s one from Kindred Blessings.

Here’s one from Homeschool in the Woods:

Here’s a pretty amazing one from Peace Creek on the Prairie.

And a really neat one from Higher Up and Further In.

And here’s a really great how to with specifics for spacing and such.

Lots of ideas. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how we’ll do ours.

But I do know where we’ll put it. The only wall in the house that can accommodate such a monstrosity is in our dining room. The wall has been blank for the two years since we moved into the house because I’ve been waiting to discover the perfect display for it. I was thinking of a brightly colored still life. A giant cluttered timeline wasn’t really what I had in mind.

Which brings me to a whole new issue. When you put one of these bad boys in your home you are declaring, loud and proud, we are homeschooling geeks. Our house is for living and learning. It will never ever be featured in Better Homes and Gardens. I’m okay with that. Mostly. I can almost guarantee that through the years this timeline will provide much more fodder for dinner conversation than a depiction of flowers in a vase. No matter how lovely those flowers might be. But a fairly large part of me longs for a tastefully decorated house.

But, I think I’m willing to sacrifice that for what I think a timeline like this can do for our family. Living with this timeline will give my children the opportunity to document what they learn through the years. It will help them revisit what they’ve learned each time they add to the timeline, and see how things all fit together. They’ll be able to see that while the United States was busy fighting the Civil War, Franz Shubert was premiering a new symphony.

They’ll be able to see how the Saints and the history of the Church fit into the rest of world history. Their knowledge of history will build on itself and will be constantly reviewed so that they will really know history. It’s something I’ve always wanted for myself. So this ugly timeline will be a gift to me and to my children.

I’ll post pictures when I get it up.

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