Using a history timeline in your homeschool is a great way to make different historical events or when different people were alive make sense to your children. They’re used a lot because they truly make a difference in your history studies! I have kept them out of our school for a while because it seemed too complicated to add…but it doesn’t have to be. Here are some easy ways to add and create a history timeline in your homeschool.

Using a Notebook for a history timeline

Your history timeline doesn’t have to be fancy. You can simply draw a line and start marking dates in a regular notebook! Take a look at what you’ll be studying this year and make a small outline of important dates, historical figures, and events, then you can get to filling that notebook in as the school year goes on. You can make this as fancy or as simple as you’d like. You can just write in names or events, your children can draw pictures, or you can print your own pictures you find online. There is no right or wrong way to do this!

You can also buy pre-made timeline books if you want to simplify it and have the extra money in your pocketbook to streamline the process even more.

Display your history timeline on your walls

Using the wall space of your homeschool room, living room, kitchen… any room in your house that you desire keeps your timeline visually available for your kiddos any time! Yes, they truly will look at this more than you expect. This is one of my favorite methods of keeping a history timeline in our homeschool because so much is memorized when it’s not assigned just by having it always available for our children to see.

You can do this in a few ways. One way is to take what you would put in a notebook and slap that up on your wall. You can make a line out of tape, print out a cute scroll… be as creative or as simple as you want to be. Some people are crafty and want it to be visually appealing, but if you’re a simple person, simple is GREAT. Don’t have simplicity keep you from this learning tool in your home.

Using other creative spaces to keep a history timeline in your homeschool

One of my favorite examples of utilizing a creative space in your homeschool is using the kitchen table as a timeline space. How cool is this?! A friend of mine has a glass cover on their table and slips things like her history timeline under the glass to keep it safe from messes, but keeps it available for her daughter to see.

Using a pre-made timeline

Here is the absolute easiest way to add a history timeline to your homeschool, and my preferred way! Use a pre-made timeline. So. Easy. This doesn’t take really any extra time other than maybe cutting and taping it up wherever you choose. I love the learning opportunity that timelines bring, but I want to be totally honest here- the extra time and extra thing to do in our homeschool has been what’s kept me from using them. Having them pre-made for me has been the game changer and that’s exactly why we started making them to go with our history curriculum in Rabbit Trails Homeschool!

Every volume of Rabbit Trails through History now has printable history timeline cards to go with it so that you can have this educational resource right at your fingertips. There are cards to go with every single lesson on a historical person or event. You can put these in your notebook, on your wall, in whatever creative space you can come up with.

Using a history timeline in your homeschool

We’d love to hear about how you use a history timeline in your home! Let us know in the comments or share a picture in our online homeschool community.