Ancient Civilizations - Making a Timeline!

-

 Whenever students study Ancient Civilizations, they need a solid grasp of place and time. Two essential things that are necessary for students to have an understanding of are timelines and how the numbers on timelines work (both during Common Era and Before Common Era) and they should also know some basics about world Geography and how to use an Atlas. 

Students were put into pairs and each assigned a civilization. Each pair was given a basic description of a civilization along with it's start and end date, and then tasked to write the name of their civilization on the start and end cards for their civilization, to write one interesting fact and to draw a picture that represents their civilization. After this they came outside and placed it on the timeline with teacher assistance. 

After all students put their cards on the timeline, the next step was to see where their civilization was located, by using an atlas. Students were then called up one by one to look at the map, and tell the teacher where their civilization was located, this map then went outside for the master display with the timeline, world map and a description of elements necessary to make something a civilization.


We then posted the Twinkl timeline in the classroom so students could compare their timeline with the timeline provided by Twinkl, and thus they were able to compare the two. 


Overall, through the co-construction of a timeline students could see when civilizations emerged and how many civilizations had overlap. They could also conceptually better understand how timelines work.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building a Community with Essential Services

-
Image
 As a part of our Grade 2 "How we Organize Ourselves" unit, students chose an essential service, created an essential service with clay and then researched that essential service. They also had to justify why they felt that service was essential to the community.  After students made their essential service, they considered which other elements were needed for their community. As a class we then co-constructed the community together. After the community was made, I introduced different variables and scenarios. For example "a robber appears" which had an easy solution as we had a police station. "A house is on fire," is another problem our community could solve as we had a fire station. Gradually though, issues became more apparent as garbage piled up, potholes appeared on the roads and sewage had nowhere to go. Our citizens were also becoming ill due to not having any clean water to drink. It was at this point that students made the realizati
Read more

The Bridge Between Home and School

-
Image
One often forgotten about aspect of teaching is the importance of the school / home connection. The question is then, how do we bridge the gap between home and school?  Of course, the essence of trying to forge this relationship always comes down to clear and respectful communication, centered around the idea that we are on the same team - the team that is looking for their child to be successful and fulfilled, the team that wants their child to develop and grow into the best person they are capable of being.  We also have to remember that with some parents we may never be able to "win them over." Furthermore, some parents may want to be more involved in their child's school life but have factors that make that difficult (such as working multiple jobs, being a caregiver or having mental health issues). At the end of the day, it is important to remember that we are the professionals, and that some perspective taking and empathy may be needed to understand a parents' po
Read more