Classroom Benchmark Timeline

Back in the Swing of Things
Wow!  It's been a crazy couple of months years.  Lots of changes happening in RW&BT's life, not the least of which was a change in teaching positions.  I now teach 6th grade science and social studies to 70 amazing students who have given me loads of new blog post ideas!   

New Beginnings
I love everything about my new job!  One of the most fulfilling moments for any teacher is that "light bulb moment" when the stars align over a student's head and you are finally connecting them with real knowledge and understanding. These are the moments we live for, right?

Necessity.. the Mother of Invention
One tool that I use to put the past into perspective is my Classroom Benchmark Timeline that I created out of simple necessity.  As we know with our children and our students, they think that anything that happened before they were born is ancient history.  When we are discussing dates in history their eyes tend to glaze over and without a concrete establishment of time I found myself losing them.  To them, all the dates seem to run together; the centuries meaningless. 

How We Use It
So I decided on 10 important dates in US history that I could use to mark the dates we are discussing at the time.  For example, we were just recently discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the date of his assassination came up.  I quickly went over to the timeline and pointed out where on the timeline it would have fallen.  They saw where that piece of the puzzle fit into the overall course of our relatively recent history and there went their light bulbs!  They were then discussing how this took place after JFK Jr. was assassinated and before this or that. 

Why Dates are Important
I recognize that there has been a shift away from memorization of dates towards a more holistic understanding of our country's past.  However, I think that this will come back to haunt us as a society as we graduate generations of students that have no clue or context about what happened before they were born.  One only has to watch a Jaywalking segment to know that we are already in trouble.  Yikes!

Cultural Context
Below each main event on the timeline I also included several other fun or silly events that have taken place over the course of that year to help aid in their understanding of time period and context.  I found this works best when we use it regularly and I think it could help to have a designated student(s) whose job it is to point out and locate the date in question on the timeline.  I would call them "Timeliners."

How did you put this into place in your classroom?  Let me know in the comments!  I would love to learn from you!

RW&BT