Ella bishop civil war timeline activity

A Civil War timeline will help your students connect historical events together. As teachers, we often teach events one at a time. Here is an easy and effective way for students to practice creating timelines during your Civil War Unit or any unit, really. Students glue the blank timelines into their social studies notebooks or keep them in a folder.

As your Civil War unit unfolds, students evaluate which events to add to their Civil War timeline worksheet. First, they brainstorm a list of all of the events they have recently learned about. Hint: Let students do this with a partner!

Ohio supports the Union side of the Civil War. Age Although divided as a state on the subject of slavery, Ohio participated in the Civil War.

Then, students evaluate the events and select the ones which are most important. Only these events are added to the timelines. This is hard stuff! Your students may have trouble deciding what is important. They may beg you to just tell them what to add to their timeline. Interpreting events and determining their significance is the work of a historian!

Give students a chance to practice critical thinking!

In , Confederate soldiers were forced out of Kentucky.

Will students sometimes choose too many or too few events? You could model this evaluating step or do it together as a class the first few times. Notice in the example above that most of the events happened at the beginning of the year while the end of the year is mostly blank.