History Timelines & Notebooks

We've used a few different ways to record history and I've included a few images of our history notebooks & timelines plus some (mostly) free resources we've used. I've updated this post to add all seven of my children's work they've done over the years. The ages represented are about 9 years to 16 years, both boys and girls.
For years we had a timeline along a wall that was a talking point with anyone who walked up the hallway but a couple of years ago we knocked the wall out to give us some more room in our kitchen area and that was the end of that.

I require them to keep a record of the history they are covering but pretty much leave it to them as to choice of how they do it. A couple have used a spiral notebook & my youngest has been using a simple composition book, but the preference seems to be for separate notebook pages. My older girls  enjoyed using scrapbooking bits and pieces on some of their work. Some liked to draw their own maps, some didn't.

Ambleside Online Year 3

Ambleside Online Year 5

Ambleside Online Year 6

Timeline figures for Famous King & Queens of England (872 AD - 1952) can be found here.

Ambleside Online Year 8

Free timeline figures are here also.

Helps for notebooking.

I used these with one or two of my boys just to give them a framework when they were first starting out with notebooking:

 

Outline maps

 Historical Maps of America


We've used some maps from Knowledge Quest:

http://www.juniorgeneral.org/ A great place for paper soldiers - as long as you don't mind hundreds of little men all over the house. We've used this site innumerable times.

http://www.papertoys.com/ Models of the Taj Mahal and Shakespeare's globe theatre.

Free Notebooking Pages here; here and here!

 Paper models of sphinx, pyramids, and other architecture.

Books and crafts for teaching history and making timelines.

Notebooking Fairy - geography, explorers etc

Make your own notebook pages

How to make paper look aged: Try this.

Reading the above (which I'd had cut out from somewhere years ago) makes me wonder about the teaching of history generally. I have a vague memory of 'learning' about the Eureka Stockade, and something about the 'Proletariat' and 'Assimilation' from my school days. Any historical knowledge I've gained has been in the process of teaching my own children so I'm not altogether surprised by some of the ridiculous answers in the snippet above.
This quote is from a Parents review article I read recently and from what I've seen in my own children it certainly rings true.

"Here we may notice the use of fiction in history. History should narrate truth. Can fiction, such as the historical novel, be in any sense an aid to truth? I think so, with proper selections and under proper guidance. Fiction kindles the imagination, awakens interest, and secures attention; it is the most pleasing form of narration and it need not sacrifice a truthful impression.

What children remember is the characters of the leading actors, their part in the movement, its issue, and the general picture of the period."

My kids love history and have read copious amounts of Sir Walter Scott, G.A, Henty, Rosemary Sutcliff, and other historical fiction writers and this has given them good background knowledge for works of historical non fiction. I noticed this when it came to them reading Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoples which can be difficult unless you have some knowledge of English history.

An 11 year Old's Notebook Keeping

Moozle started Ambleside Online Year 6 about two months ago so I thought it would be a good opportunity to record some of what she does in the way of notebook keeping each week.
I'll start with her favourite:

Nature Notebook

This is something Moozle really enjoys doing and will often suggest it early in the week. Two weeks ago we started studying earthworms and built a little worm farm to observe them:

A clear jar (glass or plastic)
3 layers - torn newspaper on the bottom, then a layer of dirt and another layer of sand
We used an upturned pot plant base as a loose lid

Keep it moist but don't overwater like we did and nearly drowned them all
Food - teabags, lettuce leaves, crushed egg shells
Cover the container with something dark - we used a black cloth bag

The Handbook of Nature Study by Anna Comstock has some ideas on pages 422-425. She suggested:

For the study of the individual worm and its movements, each pupil should have a worm with some earth upon his desk.

 Nature Studies in Australia by William Gillies & Robert Hall has a good chapter also:

Copywork

I don't think Charlotte Mason actually used the term 'copywork' (I could be mistaken, but I haven't found it if she did) but she did use the word, 'transcription,' and that it should be slow and beautiful work...

Transcription should be an introduction to spelling. Children should be encouraged to look at the word, see a picture of it with their eyes shut, and then write from memory.

Moozle has been doing this for a number of years now and I have seen a huge improvement in her spelling, especially with the addition of dictation around the time she turned ten. But I still have to watch that her writing doesn't get sloppy. She loves using coloured pens but her writing is often neater when she uses pencil. I usually let her choose her own passages now for copying or give her some choice. Shakespeare, poetry, literature, and Bible verses are some examples of what we've used.

Children should Transcribe favourite Passages.––A certain sense of possession and delight may be added to this exercise if children are allowed to choose for transcription their favourite verse in one poem and another...

A sense of beauty in their writing and in the lines they copy should carry them over this stage of their work with pleasure.

Home Education by Charlotte Mason  

French

I found this book  not long ago and we've been using it for French copywork (which we started doing about a year and a half ago).

Latin

This only gets done once a week at present:

Timeline

Moozle's Book of the Centuries and timeline is basic and no frills, as you can see below, but it works for her. We use a cheap composition book but I'd like to find a book with a combination of blank and lined pages with better quality paper as pen bleeds through the pages on this one. The entries are updated once a week, which she generally does without prompting now. She has a separate notebook for maps and written narrations on history.

I was quite surprised at how simple the idea of a Book of Centuries originally was. There's a picture here on Page 7 that shows an example. (It's slow to upload)

Some examples of my older children's history timelines and notebooks are here.

Linking up with Celeste at Keeping Company and with Kris at Weekly Wrap-up

A 15 Year old Boy's Keeping

Benj is reading his way through the Renaissance and Reformation with books from Ambleside Online Year 8 and most of his Commonplace entries have been inspired by those books. He chooses his own quotes but when he first started keeping a Commonplace book and happened to comment on something that impressed him while he was reading, I would suggest he record the passage in his book. I don't do that anymore because the habit is in place. I just like reading what he has written and to see what books have kindled his interest enough that he would record something from them.

Recently, he has quoted mostly from Churchill's The New World and Whatever Happened to Justice by Richard Maybury.

It is very helpful to read with a commonplace book or reading-diary, in which to put down any striking thought in your author, or your own impression of the work, or of any part of it; but not summaries of facts. Such a diary, carefully kept through life, should be exceedingly interesting as containing the intellectual history of the writer; besides, we never forget the book that we have made extracts from, and of which we have taken the trouble to write a short review.

Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason 

Commonplace Books have been around for hundreds of years and were kept by many great thinkers and writers. I came across this post recently, not from a Charlotte Mason perspective, and not a blog I'm familiar with, but I enjoyed the thoughts there on the how & why of Commonplacing.
Jonathon Swift, the author of the book Gulliver's Travels amongst others, wrote a letter to a young poet in 1720 with this advice:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

 

Science Notebook

Benj is using a combination of Apologia Physical Science and Understanding Physics by Isaac Asimov. He loves the detail in Asimov's book and uses Apologia as a general overview and for experiment ideas and this has been working quite well. He's almost finished the Apologia book but will continue with Asimov and start doing Biology, which I'm in the process of planning.

Timeline