This year, in part, our grade-level team is embarking on the new social studies standards. As we do that, one theme we are focusing on is how the past affects the present and the future. Students created personal timelines as one way to focus on past, present, and future. The timelines serve to connect students' own lives with the this theme as they read about, discuss, and debate events in American history.
Further, as students begin to hang their timelines up around the school, they begin to notice each others' stories of before they were born, their lives today, and the lives they imagine into the future. These conversations help students to broaden their lens and perspective about life's journey and world stories, stories from the past and present.
As we study the the standards more and think about how we will embed those standards, it's important to begin with a personal connection like the timelines students made. This focus also fits nicely into our family-student-teacher conference week, a week where we are focusing on each student's school story, a story of their interests, current experiences/performance/needs, and future aspirations.
This is the exemplar I created to guide students study: