1st Grade
1-1.3

Illustrate personal and family history on a time line.

Pacing Suggestions:

2 days

Suggested Activities:

• Create a time line that displays important events in your own life, from your birth to present.
• Design a timeline to show the holidays that your family celebrates in a year or the events that are significant to your school year.
• Find out the birth dates of student, sibling, parents, and grandparents and display on a family time line.
• Use personal photographs to create a time line.

Suggested Primary Source Documents:

• Students may want to bring in a copy of their baby book, family pictures, or other memorabilia to help them in the creation of their timelines.

Suggested Lesson Plans:

• Set the lesson by having the students brainstorm about events that have occurred in their life. Ask the students why this event was important. The teacher will then introduce a timeline to the class. The teacher should make a personal connection to the students by using events from his/her life on the timeline. The teacher should explain why a time line is used, why it is important to help us understand events during a time period. The teacher will let the students begin to write information about their individual lives. The teacher may want to ask parents for primary source documents to make this activity easier. The teacher should monitor the students’ work. Once the events are listed and significance is noted, the students will then begin to complete their timeline. The teacher should again model the construction of timeline with the students before allowing them to begin working. Once the students have completed the timeline, a sharing time should be used to allow the students to explain what they have created.