Learning History With Many Little Lines

Especially good for family history . . . or any history

ADDED March 17, 2010

Kids -- especially younger kids -- have a really hard time grasping history. Who can blame them? They've been around for five or six years, and now you're telling them about the tens, hundreds, or thousands of years that Earth's been going on without them?

Well, we have a solution for you today, a way to introduce kids to the concepts of time and history. This isn't a complete solution, but . . . it's a start.

We've created a free, downloadable PDF for you to print up and review with your kids.

This PDF contains one hundred lines, broken up into groups of ten.

If you guys are talking about history and the past, well, each of these lines is one year. So what you have printed out is a visual representation of a century.

Got it? If so, the rest is easy.

Here's what we recommend: take a pen and write "2010" by the top line on the paper. You are here.

The very bottom line in that top group would be 2001. Ten years there, get it?

So a hundred years ago -- the very bottom line on the page -- is 1911. Please write that in, too.

Now that you have the last and first years of the past century filled in, you can start adding "important historical dates."

To a young child, what is the most important, historical date? That kid's year of birth of course! Find that year and write down the big event.

Next, find the birth years of siblings, close friends, and family members. When were Mom and Dad born? How about grandparents? Kids might not be able to count each year, but they can look to easily see how many years -- or how many groups of lines -- each person has been alive.

If you're up for it, continue by adding other important dates to the page, ones that don't apply specifically to your family.

For instance, you could write in America's bicentennial year (1976), the year President Obama started in office (2009),

Try to think up other years that might interest your kids. When did Mom and Dad get married? When were family pets born? You can also write down the first year you had your own computer (my first was in 1989.)

Don't worry about being very precise or accurate. The whole point is just to get kids thinking about history and the past.

We printed out a few pages of centuries, and we added the year of the first railroad across America (1869), the year President Lincoln was born (1809), the year our state joined the U.S.A. (1850), and the year Mozart was born (1756.)

Before you get totally bored with today's history lesson, I just wanted to mention that dinosaurs last roamed the Earth about 70 million years ago. If you wanted to print enough pages to represent all those centuries to your kids, you would have to print 700,000 of these sheets! That's quite a few.

(The point being that dinosaurs lived a really, really long time ago. Even longer than Mom and Dad!)

Please have fun with this. And please tell us: what do you think about this exercise?

Thanks to Valeriana Stock for the super cool historical image above!