Secular Charlotte Mason

ChaiMama mentioned timelines, and they were something I particularly enjoyed putting together, so I thought I'd share what I did for my youngest--who was the only one left by the time I found a system that worked.

Wonders of Old timeline book by Knowledge Quest is the best thing I've found out there for putting a timeline together; I bought the CD and parchment card stock and printed out the pages as necessary, keepign them in a big heavy-duty binder.  (I didn't go with the book because I liked being able to add more pages if I wanted to, and if the kid's wanted to redo anything it wasn't a bit deal.)  Then I bought label paper and hunted up clip art on the web, cut apart old National Geographics and other magazines to glue in, and sometimes we drew our own images. The Florida Education Technology Clearing House has a website called Clipart ETC that is a wonderful resource for all sorts of clip art from various eras, much of it made from actual images of artifacts from the time in question.  (The maps from Knowledge Quest are great, too, but if you have time, you can often find blackline maps online for free--worldatlas.com is a good place to start.)

If you want something bigger, Learning Through History has great blank timelines; I bought some of their labels to use, too.  We also had one of their laminated Timelines on the wall; their stuff is usually first rate.

Caveat, both of these companies are Christian, but their material, if you steer away from their written materials and just use their blackline masters you're usually okay.

If you're dealing with very young children, you don't need to do much at all; most young kids are not going to be able to hold a lot of dates in mind.  General knowledge is the best thing to go for, Romans followed the Greeks, etc.  If your kids are a bit older, try to give them a sense of the interwoven idea of history, like the Han Empire existed in China about the same time as teh Hsuing Nu in the Steppes and the Roman Empire in the West.  Kind of like interconnecting Lego blocks, it really helps keep things in place. 

As for general history, I still adore the Kingfisher History book, and that's what we worked with the most.

ChaiMama, I hope that helped, and if not, please let me know!  I'll do what I can. 

This is great information thank you! Yes, my children are young.  My oldest boy will be 6 tomorrow.   As I mentioned, yesterday I looked up "which came first... ice age or stone age?"  LOL   I just didn't admit to such a basic question.  I am trying to present history in chronological order if possible.  We've loved dinosaurs through the pre-school years so continuing on from this just makes sense to me.  I will save these links for later.

I loved the link you put on for Pronounciation too!!  So much great information and I like that you click on a country and then you have options for various time periods.   I will be using that quite often, I think.   

Cori at 03:28PM on Sep 08, 2009

This is great information thank you! Yes, my children are young.  My oldest boy will be 6 tomorrow.   As I mentioned, yesterday I looked up "which came first... ice age or stone age?"  LOL   I just didn't admit to such a basic question.  I am trying to present history in chronological order if possible.  We've loved dinosaurs through the pre-school years so continuing on from this just makes sense to me.  I will save these links for later.

 

I loved the link you put on for Pronounciation too!!  So much great information and I like that you click on a country and then you have options for various time periods.   I will be using that quite often, I think.   

Kidipede Rocks; my professor works very hard keeping it up.

The problem with the Stone Ages is that they slide.  Neolithic is generally considered to be the advent of farming, and it depends on where you are when that happened.  9,000 BCE in the fertile crescent; 4-5,000 BCE in Europe in general, and not until 3 - 4000 BCE in the British Isles.  In China the earliest farmers date almost to the beginning of the Holocene, older than anywhere else.  Bronze Age depends on when Bronze was made, which is different in China than the West, and never happened in most of Africa.  They skipped straight to the Iron Age.  The big dates we're always getting in our archaeology classes are the Holocene (+/- 12,000 years ago), and then just that the Mesolitic were organized hunter gatherers, the Neolithics were farmers that spread out graduatlly from the Fertile Crescent in the West, with a different pattern in China.  After that it's Bronze and Iron.  If you can give them an idea of *why* the periods are different, the dates will follow.  Then worry about more detailed information if they're interestedin any one in particular.  Catal Huyuk is a good case study; there's quite a bit of good material out there on it.

We did a lot of cooking and dressing up at that age, and a lot of reading.  Nonficiton isn't as hard to find.  There's a few good  juvenile novels.  I know  Outcastand Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliffe, and Wolf Brother, by Michelle Paver, and Bone from a Dry Sea for paleolithic, by Peter Dickinson.   Sutcliffe also wrote "Sun Horse, Moon Horse," which is one of my favorite books ever, and fits in an early history reading material.  But you might want to preread it first, if your children are sensitive.  You can also google for historical fiction reading lists and usually libraries will have lists of what's on their shelves separated by age group and time period.

Oh, this helps quite a bit.  My son isn't too sensitive.  I started reading Frozen Man to him last night. He's fascinated with the human body and bones and such.  The book is good but perhaps too many facts at once for his age (long descriptions of Carbon 14 which helped me more).  It was interesting that they were looking at the frozen man's ax blade thinking it was bronze but it was copper so they used that info to date the body too.  I think sticking with the "ages" as you said, stone, bronze, iron, will help my youngster who is still learning our modern calendar. lol  He did ask, "Is that a person from our time or from ancient times - a long time ago" and he asked questions so that's pretty good, I think.  The book appears to continue into details about how frozen man lived.  Fascinating.  I'll check out the books you mentioned.  I am REALLY looking forward to learning history with my children.  Thanks!

Ah, then your son probably won't have a hard time with Sun Horse, Moon Horse.  It's a creative yet realistic take on the creation of the Uffington Horse, and at the end one of the main characters willingly goes to be sacrificed (off stage) in order to sanctify the work.  It's an amazing book, but I am very much a Rosemary Sutcliff Devotee. 

One last book that's great for the Neolithic is "Stone Age Farmers Beside The Sea:  Scotland's Prehistoric Village of Skara Brae."  Caroline Arnold, ISBN 0395776015.  It's got wonderful pictures and clear text.  There's also a website, Orkneyjar, that compiles information on current digs going on in the Orkneys.  It's linked from my WP blog if you don't find it right away.  Those might go right along with the IceMan book.  Oetzi is a fascinating case study for Mesolithic and Neolithic people. 

Learning history with my kids was probably my favorite part of homeschooling.  *g*

With my kids I used premade timelines until 1st grade or so (you can find my favorites listed on the history page of the website). I usually had a more detailed one for the specific time period/civilization we were studying and another more general one that showed how they all related. The later was laminated so that I could mark each civilization as we worked on it. Once they were writing and comfortable with "the big picture" we started our own family timeline.

Personally, I consider the Book of the Centuries (Lisa mentioned Wonders of Old) to be something completely different; esp. after talking with Catherine Levison about them. Apparently the BotC is for the kids to document, mostly in list form with just a few drawings, what *they* find interesting and is not meant to include all the main events and people that most folks include on their timelines. I don't recall reading anything about actual timelines in my CM reading; I believe it is more of a WTM concept but one I think complements CM nicely.

In regards to using books that can get too detailed for the younger set I tend to read through them first crossing out (or covering with a sticky note) the info that isn't really necessary/appropriate and I underline the info that would be better paraphrased by me. I'm thinking this method may also help Misti with Jack's issue about not liking textbooky type books. I do use them with my kids but often I paraphrase the info or only have the kids read excerpts. With some of the textbooky books just reading the captions and really studying the pictures gives the kids the info they need.

Thanks, Gina!  This is excellent advice!  I had already started pre-reading Childrens' History of the World and blaclining it for Rod (crossing off much of the religious references for him to skip or paraphrase for Jack) and I think that might help witht he more textbooky type books, too.  Actually, Rod refused to remove them entirely because as we have really gotten started, he has been thunderstruck at how poor his own education ahs been and how much he is learning, so he has beenr reading the Usborne/DK/Kingfisher books for his own reading, along with anything that doesn't catch Jack's interest.  he then tucks the information he gleans into conversation...which is working beautifully. 

And back to the topic at hand, we use the Learning Through History 2 Million BC to Present timeline to help us keep track of what happened when -- we fill it out as we study histpry, but we also use it for putting up photos from art, music, and author studies.  (And it has photos of us, too -- side by side, at the end, to shwo when we each were born.  That helps Jack to get the perspective a little about just how long that period was.    We put up little pictures for everything -- characters from books we've read, "firsts", people, characterisic costumes and architecture...I didn't intend to to put so much on, but that is one of the rituals that really seems to fire Jack up, so he suggests and I find pictures on the net and off we go!