Developing chronological understanding is such an important aspect of teaching history. It's important to give children reference points, opportunities to revisit time periods studied previously and the chance to see the links and overlaps across time periods.
A set of timelines have been designed in order to give children the opportunity to become really secure in their own chronological understanding. They are like chronological knowledge organisers, allowing children to record any knowledge that is relevant to the chronology of the units they are studying.
KS1
This set of timelines designed for KS1 gives children in each year group the chance to revisit prior learning about chronology from their previous years at primary school. At the start of each school year, they are given the relevant timeline and add new time periods studied as they move through the year. The timeline is provided with specific markers along it, and a set of people/events in the form of images that link to the topics being studied.
There are two versions for each year group:
" Child version - where children can judge where to place people and events themselves.
" Completed version - where the people/events are placed already and can be used by teachers to model or for children to refer to.
Children can add additional reference points as you feel necessary.
KS2 year group timelines
This set of timelines designed for KS2 gives children in each year group the chance to revisit prior learning about chronology from their previous years at primary school. At the start of each school year, they are given the relevant timeline and add new time periods studied as they move through the year. This allows them to understand the chronology of the time periods studied, the links between them and previous time periods, the dates that are involved and how things changed differently in different places.
There are three versions for each year group (apart from year 6) in order to ensure that chronological understanding can be developed no matter the confidence level of the children you are teaching:
" Original - where children can judge where to place time periods themselves.
" Guidelines - where children have guidelines which help them to place and date time periods
" Guidelines with dates - where children simply need to identify the right dates
Children can add additional reference points as you feel necessary, including key events or people relating to the units of study. It is recommended that they are printed on A3 size paper so that the children are able to fully explore and add to them effectively.
Personalisation for your school
In their current form, these timelines have been developed to work alongside the suggested history overview of the Learning Challenge Curriculum. If you would like to find out more about how they can be personalised for your school's curriculum, please get in touch and we can develop a set of timelines that are more bespoke to your curriculum.
Watch our video explaining how to use the timelines
