Suggested activities for developing pupils’ understanding of time and chronology
The idea behind these activities is to provide suggestions, materials and ideas which address this aspect of this important aspect of pupils’ historical understanding.
NB:
- Many of the activities can be done as word processing exercises, but there is no reason why they cannot be printed off and done on paper, as homeworks, card exercises, or groupwork in class.
- One of the advantages of having the exercises on file is that it is easy to adjust the content to make them easier/harder/more appropriate for particular teaching groups. It is also possible to provide an “answer” file, for many of the exercises, so that pupils can go through their work and see there they have made mistakes. This can help to save teachers the burden of having to mark all their pupils’ work- often pupils marking their own work can result in saving teachers’ time AND providing better feedback to pupils. Another way of allowing pupils to review their work is to use the “insert comment” facility from the insert menu. This creates a “hotspot” somewhere in the text, marked in a different colour on screen, and allows the viewer to access comments, answers, explanatory information when they position the cursor over the hotspot.
- Sometimes, (but not unfailingly!) the facility to manipulate text using the word processor can leave more time for pupils to “think about the history”, rather than spend time and effort transcribing information.
- The experience of BECTa’s resource pack on using Word Processing to develop pupils’ historical understanding suggests that often, suggested activities have to be adapted and “tweaked” in order to work successfully.
- Perhaps sequencing activities should come with a health warning; simply learning off by heart the chronological order of events or people without exploring other connections between them can be tedious and seem fairly pointless to pupils. Wherever possible, the activities should try to integrate other questions relating to the events or people sequenced. This might include classifying into different categories, making comparisons, exploring questions of continuity and change, and assessing comparative significance.
Whatever the age of pupils, there are different strands of time and chronology which teachers can address in order to develop pupils’ sense of the past. For the sake of convenience, these have been labelled T1-T4.
T1: The “mechanics” of time; dating systems and conventions, time vocabulary, how time “works”- Developing understanding of the range of terms which historians use to classify duration and period.
T2: Building up a framework or map of the past, in terms of a developing sense of what bits of history fit in where- an overview of periods of history, and the ability to relate events and issues that have been studied to an overall conceptual framework of chronology and sequence in history.
T3: There are some parts of history where pupils need to have a clear grasp of the order of events pertaining to a particular event or crisis if they are to acquire a clear grasp of the topic in question.
T4: An understanding of “Deep Time”- the scale and scope of human, and the Earth’s history. Understanding that there was life before the Romans, a time before the past was recorded in written form, and a time before there were humans on Earth