I recently shared a peek at how I constructed our world history timeline on a classical homeschooling listserv and it occured to me that it would be a great thing to share here, as well. As I mentioned before, there is a burning passion for history growing on our hearth and a timeline is a fantastic way to fan the flames.
At first I was torn between stretching a timeline across every spare scrap of wall space I could rustle up and using the scroll method. But then it occured to me that we could combine the two and get the best of both worlds. I wanted Athena to be able to grasp the continuity of history that you can get from a mounted timeline, but we only have so much wall space. I also wanted her to understand the vast amount of time that human beings were not a driving force in the Earth’s history and see how history from the human perspective has accelerated over time. So, with a little handyman help from Patris Maximus, I created a timeline scroll that is mounted on the wall for safe keeping and reference purposes, but also removable for closer examination and addition without taking up every last inch of our home’s walls. Here’s how we did it.
We bought two rolls of heavy duty brown mailing paper, 30″ wide and 15 feet long each. We also bought two 1″ diameter dowel rods that are 3 feet long. I used clear packing tape to take the first 10-12″ or so of the first roll of paper and secure it to the first dowel rod. then I rolled the paper around the rod until I reached the end of that roll. I took about 3-4″ of the end of the first roll and the beginning of the second roll and overlapped them, fastening them together with the packing tape. Then I rolled the second roll of paper around the first dowel rod until I reached the end of that roll and once again used about 10-12″ of paper to fasten the end of the second roll of paper to the second dowel rod. I now had a scroll that was 30″ wide and about 28 feet long with about 3″ of dowel rod sticking out of the top and bottom at both ends.
Patris Maximus built upper and lower, left and right brackets for the dowel rods to slide in and out of with a sort of hook on them and mounted them on one stretch of wall in our classroom so that the timeline is displayed with about a 5 foot section open at a time and can be scrolled back and forth as needed. The entire scroll can also easily be slid out of the brackets and spread out on the table to add material to it. I will have to ask him to write out detailed instructions for the brackets at a later date as I honestly have not the foggiest clue how he built them.
I drew in five lines from the bottom of the page, moving upwards about 2″ between lines. The firts line marks the eras (Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic.) The second marks off the periods, the third the epochs, and the forth the ages. The fifth line measures time itself starting at 15 billion years ago and moving forward all the way to 2015BCE (or AD, depending on who you ask.) Again, I wanted to show the expanse of the Earth’s history, the relative amount of human history and the appearance of acceleration towards modern day. But I also wanted to make it all fit. Below is the scale I used to make all of this fit into a 28 foot timeline:
Section 1- 15 BYA (billion years ago) to 1 BYA: 1″=1 billion years
Section 2- 1 BYA to 100 MYA (million years ago): 2″=100 million years
Section 3- 100 MYA to 10 MYA: 2″=10 million years
Section 4- 10 MYA to 1 MYA: 2″=1 million years
Section 5- 1 MYA to ~100,000BC: 2″=100,000 years
Section 6- ~100,000BC to 10,000BC: 2″=10,000 years
Section 7- 10,000BC to 3,000BC: 2″=1,000 years
(Sections 8-10 follow the general scale suggested at Paula’s Archives)
Section 8- 3,000BC to 1500BCE/AD: 2″=100 years
Section 9- 1500 to 1740: 2″=20 years
Section 10- 1740 to 2015: 2″=5 years
We have just begun, this week, to add pictures to it, all located and downloaded off the web for free from a variety of sources. I am hopeful that this will continue to be a useful and inspiring tool in our little homeschool for years to come and really look forward to watching it blossom with Athena, Apollo and Artemis over our next four years of history studies.