A 32-Foot Timeline for the School Room

 The last couple days we've been working on an enormous timeline for our school room.  I have one bare wall in the school room and wanted to use it for teaching space, so we decided to make a timeline.  The wall - from the door opening on the left, to then end of the room at the right is just over 10 feet long.  So basically this is a 32 foot timeline. It's really high, so he'll have to stand on a chair to put things up there, but maybe that will keep the brothers from taking everything off of it.  Plus, I wanted to use the lower space for preschool friendly stuff for the younger two.

We started by taping up a big wide strip of paper.  I have a big roll of white paper that is kind of like waxed paper - it has a waxy feel to the backside.  I'm not sure what it was originally for - maybe it was freezer paper from a butcher shop or something.  It's a huge roll we've been lugging around forever for art projects.  A 10 foot section of it didn't even make a dent in how much we have. What you see up there is just one strip of it with 2 inch blue painters tape on the top, bottom and in the middle.

You can see the roll of paper in the chair with the four year old.  This is not a solid roll.  It has a huge open center, but still, I doubt we'll ever run out of this stuff.  Anyway, it's about 18 inches wide.  I thought it would be good because we will be able to write on it with a marker and it won't go through to the wall.  We're planning on drawing lines from the point on the timeline to the pictures he will put up, so I think this will be a good thing.  My nine year old loves drawing, so the plan is for him to do most of the illustrations himself, but I'm going to let him decide what goes up there.  I'm sure we'll have a mix of photos, illustrations, and things cut from magazines and such.

 We had a lot of "helpers" too :)

The blue tape is painters tape which we originally used to hold the paper up... until the next morning when we found it on the floor.  So we stuck it back up, then added a row of masking tape to make sure it would stay up.  So far so good.  I hope that as we add papers to it, the weight doesn't become more than the tape can hold up.  (We decided to go with paper rather than taping everything directly to the wall because we are renting.  We figured all those little pieces of tape would pretty much ensure that we would have to repaint the room, so we are crossing our fingers that the masking tape pulls off without damaging the wall.)

We printed dates out on neon orange paper and stuck them up 4 inches apart (except for the final decade plus, which we put up an extra 2 foot section for just 1990 to present.  We wanted room for family pictures and for current events.  We dated that last piece 1990, 2000, 2010, and left space after that to continue current events stuff.

We could have been more precise with how straight the numbers were, and we could have used rolled up tape on the back to make it look neater (or duh, used double sided tape), but I wanted my kids to have ownership of this project (and I didn't have any double sided tape... not to mention that it didn't occur to me to get some. But that would have required a trip to town and when an idea strikes I tend to jump headlong into it without any delay.  Ahem.  Don't ask my husband what he thinks of this tendency.)

Anyway, I wanted the boys to consider this theirs.  The only way it was going to be straight and perfect was if I did it all myself, and that's not the point of homeschooling.  I did put little dots on the tape to mark where to stick the numbers, and we had to do a little creative shifting when we realized we had left out 3500 BC.  But it's all good ;)  Now we just have to start filling it in.

As for the school room, I almost have it completely set up and will hopefully be able to show you the whole room soon.  We'll see ;)