How to develop pupils’ understanding of chronology at key stage 3

Timelines

When using timelines the following key points should be considered:

• pupils need to construct timelines for themselves, not just look at completed ones.
• pupils find it harder to get a sense of the passage of time from colourless timelines, even when they show dates and events.
• many pupils benefit from physical activities requiring them to stand on a timeline and ‘move about in history’, gaining a sense of how far it was from one date to another by simply walking across the timeline.
• timelines are frequently used to place in time an event about to be studied but pupils may gain more from re-visiting the timeline at the end of a topic when they have a more detailed understanding of it. This is also the occasion to make effective connections across time to other events.

For timeline activities see www.thinkinghistory.co.uk (go to ‘Resources’ section).

Activity 1

Multiple-choice questions offer many pupils a more confident start to year 7 than open-ended questions, which can be used as a second stage diagnosis of understanding. Such questions include:

1. What is the meaning of the word ‘decade’?
   a) five years b) ten years c) a hundred years
2. What is the meaning of the word ‘century’?
   a) ten years b) a hundred years c) a thousand years
3. What is the meaning of the word ‘millennium’?
   a) fifty years b) a hundred years c) a thousand years d) a million years
4. What do the letters BC stand for?
   a) British Century b) Before Computers c) Before Christ
5. What do the letters AD stand for?
   a) Anno Domini b) After Dinosaurs c) Anno Disastrous
6. Which century are we living in now?
   a) twentieth b) twenty-first c) twenty-second
7. Which century was the year 1588 in?
   a) fifteenth b) sixteenth c) seventeenth
8. Which century was the year 793 in?
   a) seventh b) eighth c) ninth

Activity 2

Pupils may answer correctly in multiple-choice but teachers will still need to check that their understanding is sound through more open-ended questions. These kinds of questions could be used at the beginning and end of year 7. Many pupils will benefit from having understanding of centuries reinforced through questions throughout key stage 3, not just at the beginning of year 7.

1. What do the letters BC stand for?
2. What do the letters AD stand for?
3. What do the words AD mean?
4. Which century are we living in now?
5. Why is this year called 2005?
6. a) Which century was 1642 in?
   b) Which century was 871 in?
   c) Which century was 1842 in?
7. a) Name one year in the seventeenth century
   b) Name one year in the twentieth century
   c) Name one year in the sixth century
8. Put these words in order of the shortest time to the longest time: year decade day century millennium
9. What does ‘putting events in chronological order’ mean?

Activity 3

BC and AD are likely to require regular reinforcement. This is best done in the context of normal topics or enquiries. For example if you study the Roman Empire repeat this activity just using major events in the history of Rome, both BC and AD. Another opportunity to reinforce BC and AD comes in end of year reviews, when the same activity can be used but can include key events studied across the year, perhaps as a prelude to a debate on the most significant.

Some students will prefer to do this kind of activity as a card-sort. It can also be done physically with students holding cards or wearing tabards forming a timeline at the front of the room.

Place these events in chronological order:

• The Battle of Hastings 1066AD
• Julius Caesar invaded Britain 55BC
• The first Olympic Games 776BC
• Muhammad fled Mecca and travelled to Medina 622AD
• The English defeated the Spanish Armada 1588AD
• Alfred became King of England 870AD
• The Parthenon temple was built in Greece 432BC
• People began building Stonehenge 2800BC

Activity 4

End of year reviews also offer the opportunity to check quickly whether pupils can relate year dates to the correct century.

1. Match the events in box A to dates in box B.
2. a) Which event happened in the eleventh century?
   b) Which two events happened in the fourteenth century?

Activity 5

Pupils cannot be expected to understand the concepts of causation, or change and continuity, unless they can put events in the correct chronological order. This is an example of an activity that could be used early on in year 7.

1. These sentences describe some of the events in 1066. Use all the sentences to write a paragraph explaining what happened in 1066 then re-arrange the sentences to write a second paragraph telling a different story of 1066.
• A great battle was fought.
• Harold was crowned King of England.
• King Edward died.
• The King of Norway invaded England.
• Another great battle was fought.
• The Duke of Normandy invaded England.
2. Why would this task be easier if you had been given the date of each event?
3. What does ‘putting events in chronological order’ mean?
4. In history it is important to explain why things happened, such as why the Duke of Normandy became King of England. If the six sentences are in the wrong order, why does this make it difficult to explain why the Duke became King?

Activity 6

A useful device for reinforcing pupils’ chronological knowledge is to use periodic formal and informal testing of key dates, terms, events, individuals, and allocate homework for revision. Day-to-day questioning of pupils can be used to review and make some of the links between and across periods. Permanent timelines on display on the walls of classrooms or fastened into pupils’ exercise books will help to ensure that chronological frameworks remain explicit.

Activity 7

For use in diagnosing pupils’ knowledge and understanding after key stage 2, based on the most common periods studied at key stage 2. This can be done with pictures and cards or can become a physical activity with pupils moving around the room to find their pairs and create a physical timeline.

Provide pupils with pictures of a) housing and b) people, one each from 6 periods – Greek, Roman, Saxon/Viking, Tudor, Victorian, twentieth century.

Summary of possible tasks:

1. Pair up the houses with the people.
2. Put the pairs of pictures in chronological order.
3. Which period does each pair come from? (You can leave this open or provide period names to match to pictures. You could add an anachronism to one of the pictures.)
4. Name one other person who lived at the time of each pair of pictures.
5. Place each period on a timeline (showing dates only).

Activity 8

Picture sorting activities at regular intervals throughout key stage 3 is an effective way of developing and reinforcing pupils’ sense of period. Examples of possible sets of pictures are:

Set A: Roman, Saxon and Viking, Middle Ages
Set B: Norman, early Middle Ages, later Middle Ages
Set C: Tudor or Stuart
Set D: eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth centuries
Set E: Victorian, inter-war, 1940s and 1950s, 1960s onwards

Possible tasks include:

1. Match the pictures to the correct period in history.
2. Label the picture sets with the correct period and locate those on a timeline.
3. Suggest one anachronistic picture to add to each group.
4. Research a set number of other pictures to add to each group, perhaps to illustrate a particular theme, such as warfare.

It is important for developing an enduring sense of period that the earlier periods are not ignored once pupils move into years 8 and 9. Cross-period sorting activities in years 8 and 9 should include, for example Roman and medieval pictures to maintain pupils’ knowledge of those periods and to help distinguish and define later periods.

Activity 9

This is a summary of an activity described in more detail in ‘Big stories and big pictures: making outlines and overviews interesting’ (Riley, Teaching History, 88, July 1997).

Medieval picture-hunting game

1. Spread out about 60 pictures on tables. (A handful of old textbooks will provide the bulk of the pictures.) Divide the pupils into about 10 groups, each group being assigned a topic, such as warfare, religion, education, buildings, wealth, poverty, women, farming, food, towns.
2. Each group sends out a ‘hunter’ to find pictures related to their topic. Assign the hunting round a short period of time, and then repeat with another pupil from each group as hunter, until all the 60 pictures have been collected.
3. Give each group 25 slips of paper labelled with their topic. These are the group’s calling cards. Now each group sends out a hunter to look at other groups’ cards and search for pictures linked to their topic. For example the ‘women’ group might find a picture of a woman working in the fields that had originally been selected by the ‘farming’ group. The hunter from the ‘women’ group’ takes the picture and leaves a calling card in return. Repeat this until enough exchanges have been made to show a lot of links between topics (signified by the growing pile of calling cards).
4. The debriefing (see the article for further details) focuses on the links between different aspects of the period and enables pupils to build up a strong visual sense of the period, the major concerns and activities. For example pupils could go on to complete a sense of period summary diagram (see Activity 10) for the Middle Ages as a result. They can also discuss similarities and differences with other periods and with today, as these distinctions also play an essential part in building a sense of period.

Activity 10

The sense of period diagram provides the focus for a research task or for identifying what pupils know and understand about a period. One advantage of using the diagram as the basis for the activity is that it makes the concept of sense of period explicit and part of pupils’ vocabulary.

Research task:

At the beginning of work on a period, set pupils the task of working in groups to find answers to the questions on the diagram. An end of enquiry task is to ask pupils to choose:· three pictures or people that sum up the period · a title for the period or century, eg ‘The Age of …’ .· appropriate music to sum up the period.

Activity 11

The ‘odd one out’ activities described in Thinking through history by Peter Fisher can be used at the end of a topic or year to re-visit and reinforce pupils’ sense of period. Straightforward examples are suggested below but increasingly sophisticated sets can be made to challenge more able pupils. Pupils can either carry out research or draw on their existing knowledge and understanding of a topic to find the answers.

Examples:
Set A: Battle of Hastings, Magna Carta, Domesday Book, The Harrying of the North
Set B: Elizabeth I, Charles I, Charles II, Oliver Cromwell
Set C: 55BC, 43AD, 60AD, 1066AD
Set D: Marne, Somme, El Alamein, Ypres
Set E: Murder of Becket, Third Crusade, Battle of Agincourt, Magna Carta
Set F: Spinning Jenny, printing press, steam engine, iron ships
Set G: The Civil Wars, The Spanish Armada, Drake’s circumnavigation of the world, Dissolution of the Monasteries

Activity 12

A card-sort activity to enable pupils to gain an overview of developments in working lives from 1066 to the present day and an example of how chronological knowledge is essential for an understanding of important concepts such as cause, change, significance.

Pupils are asked to use the set of cards A–K as prompts so that they can draw on their knowledge and understanding of key stage 3 history to complete some of the activities that are progressively more challenging.

Pupils:

• sort the cards to tell the story
• place them on a timeline in sequence and add dates from knowledge or research
• bring the story up to date for the twentieth century (give out blank cards to complete)
• ask questions about the patterns of change and continuity, significance of individual events, turning points
• compare and begin to analyse interpretations, eg which events might be emphasised or left out by someone telling this story from a particular standpoint
• ask questions about what else was happening at the same time as individual events so that connections are made to other aspects of society, or ask questions such as Who was alive at this time? Who was the ruler?

Initially the pupils could be asked to use the cards in group discussions so that they can explore and share their ideas before completing a written task on developments in working lives from 1066 to the present day.

This task could easily be adapted to focus on other themes that feature in the key stage 3 programme of study such as political, religious, cultural or scientific developments.

Activity 13

A different card-sort activity that summarises two stories and offers the opportunity to see which other events from the period pupils can add to a timeline. This activity shows how chronological knowledge helps in understanding how interpretations are made and used.

Possible tasks include:

1. Sort the cards into two stories about the Middle Ages:
• the story of England and France·
• the story of England and the rest of Britain.
2. Place the cards on a timeline, with one story above the line and one story below.
3. Draw each story as a graph to show the successes and failures.
4. Retell each story a) orally b) in writing.
5. Add three other important events in the Middle Ages to your timeline. What makes them significant enough to choose? How do they affect the existing stories?

Activity 14

There is a wide range of possible end of year and end of key stage activities that require pupils to look back over past work and so reinforce their knowledge and understanding of the chronological framework. Short debating activities focusing on significance have great potential, providing the pupils follow clear criteria in making their choices.

Variants include:

1. Choose the most significant man, woman and event studied in history this year and justify your selections.
2. Which was the best or worst century to live in (or best/worst decade of the twentieth century)?
3. Choose your top five topics from the whole of key stage 3 – the most significant people, events, technological developments.
4. Choose the image that sums up a century or each period studied this year. Create an art gallery from the visual sources and choose music to be played that sums up each period.

Activity 15

The ‘lifelines’ activities described in Thinking through history by Peter Fisher have great potential for developing chronological knowledge and understanding over both long and short periods. Lifelines can be described as ‘timelines with attitude’, requiring pupils to place events on a timeline which acts as the horizontal axis of a graph while the vertical axis is used to describe feelings. For example pupils plot their feelings as peasants between 1348–81, marking events along the timeline axis but also giving a ‘feelings’ rating for each event from ‘ecstatic’ to ‘depths of despair’. Such graphs can be created on paper, physically in the classroom by moving pupils as markers, on Excel spreadsheets or on whiteboards.

Another example is plotting key events of World War Two on a lifeline. The horizontal axis would range from September 1939 to August 1945 while the vertical axis would represent British views from ‘gloom and despair’ to ‘wild excitement’. Pupils can place the events below on a lifeline. You could also provide blank cards so that each group of pupils can add more events to the lifeline.

Activity 16

Local studies can provide an overview of history by following the long term development of a community or place. This enables links to be made across a variety of periods and with major national events, even if one question is Why was x not affected by [event] y?

The history department at Holbrook High School, Suffolk has developed an enquiry for the end of year 7 on How and why has Dunwich changed since Roman times?. This enables the pupils to trace the development of Dunwich from Roman and early Saxon prosperity, through mid-Saxon decline to Viking growth (cementing links to key stage 2). Then follows real prosperity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries to decline in the age of the Black Death, the impact of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the settlement’s status as a rotten borough and the death toll among local men in the World Wars. A living graph records the rise and fall of the settlement’s prosperity across time.

Such enquiries can be placed in any year of key stage 3. Looking forward from year 7 to events not yet covered in detail has not proved to be a problem and helpful reinforcement in years 8 and 9 stems from questions such as Do you remember what happened to Dunwich at the time of …?

Activity 17

Provide pupils with a simple pictorial history of the world from hunter-gatherers to the present day, using no more than 12 pictures or summaries. Ask pupils to:

• sequence the pictures
• suggest when on a 24-hour clock or yearly calendar these events would have happened if history was reduced to that scale
• highlight those aspects that they studied at key stage 2.

For an example of this kind of activity see What is history? year 9: a conclusion for key stage 3 (Dawson, 2004, pages 40–41). This single-lesson activity could be introduced in year 7 then repeated with additional information to expand the level of detail in each further year of key stage 3.

Activity 18

Activities on dating systems other than BC and AD enable you to move into wider histories. Begin by exploring why the BC/AD system is used and the logic behind it. Move onto asking why you should be suspicious if you are given a Roman coin dated 54BC and then move on to how the Romans dated their years from the foundation of the city. A third system to look at is the Islamic dating system: What does it have in common with the Christian system? You could then move on to other systems or ask pupils to suggest alternative events from which dating systems would begin: Would it be easier for example if BC/AD was abandoned and a new system introduced starting with the building of the pyramids?

Activity 19

Timeline activities ranging over a variety of cultures can provide a quick way of giving more attention to non-European cultures. For example divide the class into groups and give each group a timeline telling the story of a culture, such as China, Islam or the North American native peoples. Include such things as major developments, inventions and building of cities etc. Now ask each group to create a set of sorting cards from the information on the timeline so that they can ask another group to recreate their timeline and suggest which culture it describes.