Story of the World on the Timeline

I LOVE adding stuff to our big basement timeline. I love it more than the girls do. I'm pretty sure that I won't be happy until I've covered every white space around that timeline with Sharpie text, Mod Podged pictures, and increasingly meandering arrows pointing to dates on the line.

We've listened happily to Story of the World audiobooks for years, but now that we're starting a formal study of Story of the World, part of the work for each chapter includes printing out two copies of timeline cards for each chapter (I'm sorry to say that the blog in which these particular timeline cards could originally be found is no longer online, although these cards were made by another homeschool parent, and so you could certainly make your own!). One copy of each card is laminated, and as part of their schoolwork the girls memorize the dates on them and practice ordering them.

The other copy, however, is cut out and glued--

--right to the timeline wall!

You can probably tell just from this short segment that there's some overlap--at some point we must have read about nomads in 6000 BCE, and put THAT on the timeline, before we began Story of the World. I don't mind, however, especially because it helps us remember that history isn't the strict continuum that we might fool ourselves into believing. For instance, SOTW specifically talks about nomads in the Fertile Crescent, and THEN farmers in the same region, but it's important to know that all the nomads didn't just suddenly up and become farmers, especially because there are still nomads today.

And yes, I still do have plans for that big basement map that I've been talking about for two years. I wonder if I should get that done so that we can put the Fertile Crescent on it?