Resources and ideas about children's understanding of
Time
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Back to Time Menu
Back to History PGCE
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