Making History Fun with American History Timeline Activities

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Engage your students in your upcoming history lessons with fun and engaging American History timeline activities! This interactive timeline is exactly what you need!

I have to admit that history has NEVER been a favorite of mine. From a very young age, I dreaded history classes. I never could remember names and dates and battles and the order of our presidents. I just never found it relevant, nor could I figure out why I needed to know about what happened so long ago.

Now, as a homeschool mom, I am teaching history to my own kids. There are two things I’ve done consistently over the years to make history more engaging and fun.

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American History Timeline

Over the years, I’ve tried many different timelines with my kids. We done notebook timelines, index cards on a clothesline strung across the room, and even a giant wall timeline. The problem is that while it’s great to see the order in which historical events happened, there’s not always a linear connection between one event and another.

However, we’ve found a solution to that with The Giant History Timeline from Sunflower Education. This interactive, giant wall timeline shows students the connection between historical events in a way that helps them visualize cause and effect.

About the Giant American History Timeline

This timeline is unique in that it is a timeline built through activity pages. Each of the two books (1: Pre-Colonization – Reconstruction and 2: 1870’s – Present) is divided into 8 units. Each unit contains teaching notes and activity sheets.

The teaching notes contain a unit overview, focus activities to kick off the unit, instructions for constructing the timeline, and notes for each individual activity sheet. (There’s also an answer key in the back of the book.)

You can use as few or as many of the activity pages to build your timeline. You can build a full timeline from each of the units combined, or you can make individual timelines for each unit/time period/event.

Our Experience with the Giant American History Timeline

We opted to focus on the Revolutionary War Period. My daughter is obsessed with the Hamilton soundtrack and Broadway play. That obsession has piqued her interest in the Revolutionary War. As I mentioned above, we aren’t huge history fans so I grasp on to any opportunity I can to dig in.

Because of the musical soundtrack, she has a small working knowledge of the timeline of the Revolutionary War. The activity sheets helped her to dig in to the hows and whys that led to the start of the war.

Because the American History Timeline is designed to be used with any curriculum, we gathered some of our favorite resources to learn about the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and more.

These activity sheets aren’t simple fill in the blank worksheets. They are pages that encourage kids to read about the events and use higher level thinking to answer questions. For example, kids are asked to imagine they are a soldier at the Boston Massacre, write a sentence describing the scene depicted on the page, and then explain why their actions were justified.

Our Favorite Resources

Fill your history basket with a great collection of Revolutionary War resources for kids. Most of these books can be found at your local library or used bookstore. If you have a hard time finding them, you can order them on Amazon by clicking the images below.

We also relied on these websites for information:

• Mr. Nussbaum: American Revolution for Kids

• The Ducksters: American Revolution

• Mr. Donn: The American Revolution

Assembling the American History Timeline

We opted to do the full timeline since my daughter was so interested in this time period. Using the activity pages and the arrows (included in the timeline book), kids can see the connection between the events leading up to and following the Revolutionary War.

The book has a diagram to follow for hanging the complete (and basic) timeline. So, we followed it. I love that the arrows show the correlation between the events that led up to and followed the Revolutionary War.

This is a great way to build a meaningful, interactive history timeline that is sure to enrich and engage your learners.

Would you like to try this out with your own students? Sunflower Education is offering my readers a 20% discount on The Giant American History Timeline Bundle (digital only)! Just use the promo code TIMELINE20 at checkout.

Enter below for your chance to win a digital copy of The Giant American History Timeline Book 1.

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