Lesson Plan on Making a World History Timeline 

Teacher: Chad Barrows  Subject: Social Studies
Grade Level: 5th Date: 11/13/2000

Strand: Time Continuity, and Change
Standard: * Locate specific information on a timeline pertaining to the growth and development of the United  States (World).  * Read graphs, charts, tables, and analyze political cartoons.

I. Content: Skill- I want my students to be able to arrange historical events in chronological order using timelines.

II. Prerequisites: Students need basic computer, research, and graphing skills, and knowledge of what continents are and the names of them.

III. Instructional Objective: Given posterboard, markers, and a list of historic events  the student will construct an accurate timeline placing at least five events from the continent his/her group studied (one event for each of the following time periods; B.C., 1 A.D to 500, 501 to 1000, 1001 to 1500, and 1500 to 2000)., and two events from each of the continents that the other groups study, in chronological order on the timeline.

IV. Instructional Procedures:

Lesson Initiating Activity: I will begin the lesson by introducing the concept of chronological order. I will draw a timeline on the board to model the concept of a timeline. I will ask for the students to raise their hand if they can tell me the first thing that they did when they woke up today. I will then call on a child, after s/he tells me what they did I will ask them what they did after that, and so on, until the child has brought me to the up to the present moment in time. Every time the student gives me an event I will write it down on the timeline. The students will then take five minutes to write down what they did this morning, in chronological order. They will then make comparisons of their lists with their neighbor. I will wrap-up by reiterating what chronological order is, and explain the project that we are about to begin.

Core Activities: Next, the students will be arranged in six groups. Each group will be given a continent (except Antarctica), and they will be set free to research their assigned continent. Two groups will work at the computer station, while the other two research books for their information at the class library. They will be looking for historical events/dates that occurred on their particular continent. After 15 minutes, the groups will switch stations. The groups will then take 5 to 10 minutes to discuss and decide on the five events that they feel were the most important (one from each of five time periods; B.C. , 1A.D. to 500, 501 to 1000, 1001 to 1500, and 1501 to 2000). Each student will list his or her group’s five chosen events on a piece of paper, in a timeline.

Next, the students will jigsaw. A member of each group will meet with a member of each of the other groups to form a new group. The students in these groups will be sharing the information that their original groups found. This way all of the students get to learn about all of the continents from each other. The students will write down three of the five events from each individual continent (other than their own continent).

For the last core activity I will draw another timeline on the chalkboard and I will ask for one of the students in the Africa group to tell me one of their historical events. I will list this on the timeline in the appropriate place. Then I will ask the Asia group to tell me a historical event that they found. I will then ask for someone to raise his or her hand if  he or she knows if it should go to the left or the right of the last event we listed, and approximately how far to the left or right. I will repeat this several times, until I feel the students have caught on, and are able to place the events in the appropriate places on the timeline.

Closure Activity: The students will return to their original groups for this activity. They will be constructing group timelines with posterboard and markers. These will consist of the five events from their continent and three events from each of the other five inhabited continents. All six timelines will be put on a bulletin board outside the classroom.

ESOL Considerations: The students will be in cooperative learning groups for the majority of this project. This is an effective ESOL strategy, because the ESOL students will be assisted by their peers. Also, the ESOL students may be able to share some historical events from their native land that their group or other groups could use for their timelines. 

This should help promote a feeling of importance, contribution, and self-worth to ESOL students. I will be modeling for the students, which is also an effective ESOL strategy.

V. Materials and Equipment:
· Chalkboard & Chalk
· Computers with Internet access
· Reference books from the library
· Posterboard
· Markers

VI. Assessment: Each student will be given a piece of posterboard, markers, and a composite list of all thirty events that were found (five events from each of the six groups), but they will not be given the dates. Each student will have to construct a timeline, list all five of the events/dates that they found for his or her continent, and at least two events/dates from each of the other five inhabited continents accurately on the timeline. The events/dates that the students list will be color coded by continents. 

VII. Follow-up Activities: Over the course of the next couple of days I will let the students work on a class timeline. This would be a large timeline that lists all of the events that the students found for all of the continents. This could be used for the bulletin board. Another activity would be for us, as a class, to record special occasions that occur in our classroom and create a working timeline during the course of the whole school year. We could include dates when we had perfect attendance as a class, birthdays, days when everybody scores well on a test, etc.

VIII. Self-Assessment: I will review the group timelines that the students made, as well as, the individual timelines that were created for the assessment of the lesson to determine if the intended learning outcome was indeed actualized.

It should be noted that this lesson would be most useful as a primer for a unit on world history, or history of the great civilizations. It will help students build charting and graphing skills and help them organize their knowledge of history.

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