Timeline

I remember absolutely nothing from my own history education before high school except for one soap carving of the Parthenon, and from what I remember of that project is that it's a darn good thing that I've never had to depend on soap carving to make a living.

I don't know why history gets the life sucked out of it, but my cure has been to add a much more interest-led layer of projects. Pick something - anything - and find out its history. It doesn't have to be the Liberty Bell, or anything so textbook. How about the history of horses? or just the history of wild horses in the outer banks of North Carolina? History of Legos? Rocketry? Hawaiian shirts? Brain surgery? Poodles?

My only rule for history projects is that they go on the timeline. We plod through our regular studies (and really they aren't that bad) just to give a framework for everything. Ancient Egypt was before the American Revolution. Pompeii was before the Magna Carta. So once we've been through once, all those projects can have a context.

I printed my own timeline book on ledger sized paper (65lb coverstock so it stands up to use), 3-hole punched and folded so each page makes a kind of pocket for extra bits and pieces (coloring pages, reports) If you want to do one just like mine, I've uploaded it to lulu.com as a free download. It requires 141 sheets of 11x17 paper and at least one 4" binder. I've split ours into two 3" binders because we end up sticking a lot of extra stuff in the pockets and it keeps getting bigger. I would have been lazy and just bought a blank timeline, but honestly I couldn't find one that actually went back as far as I wanted. I really wanted all 4.55 billion years so we could put "first bacteria" on the line just for perspective...