Have you or your student ever struggled with understanding which century is the 15th century? (It’s the one when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.)
Have you ever wondered why the Western calendar does not contain the year zero? (We can blame the Romans.)
Did you know that the majority of the world celebrated the new millennium one year too early? (Including me.)
These are concepts that I have come to understand over time, but I still had a few mental blocks with centuries and millennia.
But then…
We ended up with 600 toothpicks, a bunch of rubber bands, and a book with two informative lessons that helped me explain this concept to my children (while attempting to contain the energy of three boys in a hotel room in Atlanta).
In Lessons on Time, we discovered the relationship of years to centuries and millennia while grasping the concept of BC and AD in the Western calendar using a toothpick timeline as our basis.
The lessons were simply scripted and contained multiple opportunities for our family to review all three cycles of our past memory work. (I cannot even describe how much I love this aspect of doing this particular study!)
In fact, the hardest part of the entire lesson was bundling up all the toothpicks!
How long did this take?
The book is split up into two (rather long) lessons, which we completed across two separate days. The lessons can be split up into mini-lessons to spread out over a longer period of time (up to one or two weeks?). It also concludes with a test for students (and parents) to take after the study has been completed.
What ages would you recommend this for?
While our youngest at age 5 is still unable to grasp the concept of time (he still thinks a week is a day and that tomorrow was yesterday), he loved singing his history and timeline songs when we talked about specific events. Our 8-year-old gained a better understanding of how the timeline tracks time, and our 10-year-old was able to apply/extend the concepts and answer questions about which millennium or century specific events/dates occurred. For me, this lesson helped to solidify my thinking about our timeline and events throughout history. So… I’d recommend it for all ages!
What do I really think?
Every time a historian names a century, I have to admit that the numbers floating around in my head have not necessarily been the correct ones. It’s difficult to reach historical literacy without an understanding of how periods of history are named. Lessons on Time is a hands-on history learning tool that teaches actual dates and events according to the centuries and millennia in which they occurred. It teaches children (and adults) foundational concepts of how to construct a timeline and is a great exercise in thinking through time.
One of my favorite things about Brimwood Press products is that our family honestly refers back to them often. As with all of the Brimwood Products we have used, Lessons on Time will be one to which we refer often in the future. Visit Brimwood Press to purchase a copy of Lessons on Time and toothpick kit. If you are interested in simple products to use for a review of history or for exploring worldview with your family, be sure to visit the following links:
Writing Historical Fiction Using Your Family Tree
What about Worldview?
Calendar Quest: 5,000 Years of History in 16 Lessons
History through the Summer… and Beyond
Conversations from the Garden
Christian Theology and Ancient Polytheism: Study for the Dialectic
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