Using Historical Timelines in Your Classroom

Historical Timelines

One of the biggest challenges when teaching social studies is that it can be hard for students to grasp how long different time period are and how they connect to each other. We’ve found one of the easiest ways to overcome this is using historical timelines! In this post, we’ll be covering how teaching with timelines can be helpful, how to set them up, and some resources we’ve designed to make teaching with them easier!

Teaching with Timelines

Some textbooks provide timelines, but most of the time, they don’t connect everything together. Rather, they only focus on specific time periods and stop there. Because of this, they don’t show when certain civilizations or events might overlap, but rather one after the other. We know history is actually pretty messy and not as neatly organized.

If we think about it from an ancient civilizations standpoint, it can be difficult to compare and contrast different civilizations if there isn’t a clear visual. When it comes to US historical events, so many of them overlap that it can be hard for students to connect them without physically seeing when they occurred. Teaching with visual timelines that connect and show overlap can help give better context to your students and ease these issues!

Classroom Setup

When it comes to setting up a historical timeline in your classroom, it really depends on the topic you are teaching. If you’re creating your own resource from scratch, you want to make sure it’s very visual for your students. With that, we recommend color-coding to help separate each time period or event as they overlap. You can add other visuals as well, such as historical images to help students make better connections. Then simply display them in a part of your classroom that’s easy for students to see.

For more info and instructions on how to set up a timeline in your classroom, you can watch the corresponding video here.

Down below we’ve put a few resources together that may make setting up a timeline in your classroom easier. They cover topics such as Ancient Civilizations as well as both parts of US History! You can click on each image to see the related products!

Ancient Civilization Timeline

This Ancient Civilization timeline covers everything from Prehistory to the Middle Ages, showing approximations of where each civilization began and ended. The timeline also has color-coded posters that include historical images to help students compare the context of each civilization. The timeline itself spans from before 5500 BCE to just past 2000 CE, which can help students grasp where they currently fit in history!

American History Timelines

When teaching American History, it is often split into early (for 7th grade) and modern (for 8th grade) timeframes. With that in mind, we’ve made two separate timelines that cover each part with corresponding posters.

Early American Historical Timeline

Our Early American history timeline covers the First Americans through the Civil War, showing where each event began and ended as well as where they overlapped. Just as with the Ancient Civilizations timeline, each poster is color-coded to the specific event and gives visual context. The timeline itself is separated into 25-year blocks, spanning from 1375CE to 1900CE.

Modern American Historical Timeline

Our Modern American timeline covers events from 1865 CE to the present, ranging from Reconstruction through the Modern Era. It does overlap our Early American timeline as it starts in 1840CE. This allows students to connect the timeframe of events that transferred over from early to modern American history. This timeframe is shorter than the Early American resource, having the timeline separated into smaller, 10-year blocks.

Teaching Social Studies

Whether you teach Ancient Civilizations, US History, or any other history class, constructing a historical timeline in your classroom is a great way to help your students connect everything. There are so many ways to set them up and they’re a great addition to your teaching!

If you liked this post on using historical timelines in your classroom, you may also enjoy this blog post covering 10 different classroom decor ideas for social studies teachers!

Are you looking for some new teaching ideas to engage your students in your social studies class? If so, you’ll love our FREE guide: 5 Creative Projects to Ignite Student Engagement in Your Social Studies Class. These activities have both printable and digital options and can work for any social studies subject!

The Benefits of Student Pen Pals

Student Pen Pals

One of the favorite things we ever did in our teaching was setting up pen pals for our students. We were a bit nervous at first because we didn’t really know where to start when making connections. However, after having multiple amazing experiences with student pen pals in our classes, we highly recommend it! In this post, we’ll be covering the multiple benefits of having pen pals, as well as some tips on how to get started.

Benefits of Pen Pals

Making Personal Global Connections

We live in a globalized world and have access to more information than ever before, but it can be tough for students to make personal connections with others. Through our experiences, we’ve been able to pair up our students with pen pals from Spain, Peru, Switzerland, Ireland, and Germany! Doing this allowed our students to form one-on-one connections with students from around the globe and learn about their similarities and differences.

Improve Communication Skills

Writing may not be a favorite activity of all of our students, but if they’re writing to a pen pal, it can become much more enjoyable! Writing to their pen pal allows them to work on multiple different skills, such as formal letter writing, email etiquette, and practicing another language, and it can also help your students make connections to your current curriculum.

Making Friends

A more obvious social benefit is your students can make friends. This doesn’t always happen, but we’ve been very pleased to see many of our students create amazing friendships. Some of our previous students have even shared that they continued communicating with their pen pal after the school year ended!

Examine Personal Culture

While students are learning about their pen pal’s culture, this also gives them the opportunity to examine their own. Many students have not had the chance to travel abroad, so having to communicate about their culture provides a way to view it a bit differently. In our experience, it wasn’t until we were fully outside of U.S. culture that we could truly see the differences, but communicating with an international pen pal offers a taste of this!

Combat Prejudice and Intolerance

While there are many resources that can help us learn about different cultures, discrimination based on various elements of social identity is very prevalent. With that, it’s vital that our students grow to be more understanding, open-minded individuals. Having pen pals can be a way to break down those barriers and allow students to gain connections they otherwise might not have thought possible.

Pen Pal Tips

If having student pen pals sounds like something for your class, here are some tips to help you get started:

First off, we recommend using the site epals.com and setting up an account with your school email (if you have one). From there you can start making connections with other teachers either internationally or domestic. The best way to decide where to start is really think about what you want to gain from this experience.

Once you’ve created a partnership with another teacher, there are multiple ways to go about it based on your goals!

Pen Pals in the Classroom

Overall, getting pen pals can be one of the most memorable and impactful things you’ll do with your students! If you’re curious about our student pen pal experiences, we’ve put this guide together to help get you started! It contains more details on where to start, different types of experiences, many prompts, and more!

If you’re interested in more teaching ideas, check out our blog post on creative social studies teaching strategies! If you like this post on the benefits of student pen pals, consider watching the corresponding video here.

Teaching with GRAPES in Ancient Civilizations

Teaching with GRAPES

Are you an Ancient Civilizations teacher looking to add GRAPES into your curriculum? If so, you are in the right place! In this blog post, we’re going to break down GRAPES in 3 ways; what they are, how they can be helpful, and different resources we’ve used to incorporate them into our lessons. By the end of this post, you’ll be able to start successfully teaching with GRAPES!

What are GRAPES?

Grapes (while also a delicious fruit) are actually an acronym containing all the major pieces of every ancient civilization. Many world history and ancient civilization teachers use GRAPES to help present the information of each civilization or unit they cover. Here are the specific components of G.R.A.P.E.S.:

G – Geography

Where is each civilization located? How do the people living there interact with the environment? How does the environment shape the civilization? This component studies how geography affects the lifestyle and development of a specific civilization through location, climate, interaction, and more.

R – Religion

What is the belief system(s) of each civilization? How do those beliefs shape the culture? What factors might have led them to that belief system? This topic covers how each civilization had their own systems of morals and traditions, where they might have gotten it from, and how they interact according to these rules.

A – Achievements

What are some of the accomplishments or achievements of each civilization? What innovations or inventions have they created? How do these accomplishments affect our lives today? These achievements can include anything from science, math, writing, architecture, and more!

P – Politics

What type of government was used in each civilization? What were some of their laws and how were those laws organized? How are those governments different from the ones today? This area covers the power dynamics of each civilization and how decisions were carried out.

E – Economics

What was the economy of each civilization built around? Was the civilization more of an agricultural or trading society? How did their currency work? This is where you can dive into how resources were distributed, if the specific civilization traded with outside groups, and so on.

S – Society

When it comes to society, many teachers mainly discuss the social structure of the civilization but the study of society can get into much more than a social hierarchy. Who are some of the famous people from that civilization? How is society organized? Why do certain inequities exist? These are all important questions to ask.

Why are GRAPES helpful?

After teaching Ancient Civilizations for so long, you realize there is an enormous amount to cover. It can be overwhelming not only for your students, but for you as a teacher trying to figure out what to focus on and present. It can be a challenge making sure that you not only cover your country’s history, but the rest of the world’s as well. Especially in the United States, world history often takes a back seat.

Using GRAPES makes it easier to focus on the major themes, ideas, and accomplishments each ancient civilization has had throughout history. It gives you a road map on what things to emphasize, especially if you have limited time to cover many topics. It’s also a wonderful tool because it works with any civilization you choose to discuss in your class.

GRAPES Teaching Ideas

GRAPES Posters

As a nice reminder for students all year long, we’ve created these GRAPES Posters that break down the separate parts of civilizations. They provide definitions for each component and come with eye-catching images for your visual learners! Set them up in your classroom where it’s easy to see, and your students will always have an easy reminder if they forget.

One-Pager GRAPES Handout

Along with our posters, we’ve also designed this one-page handout to give to students. It includes each part of GRAPES and their different definitions, so students will always have a resource on hand! Another option is to use the color version as a poster for your classroom and give students a black and white copy.

Ancient Civilization GRAPES Slideshow

Providing definitions and examples is a must to help your students understand each component of GRAPES. With our GRAPES Slideshow and Activity, you go through each separate component but are able to break it down further to give more context. Afterward, there are some helpful questions to complete to check for understanding.

We recommend doing this activity before you start teaching your first civilization (but if you didn’t have a chance to do this, it is never too late!). Once you’ve covered basic skills and gone over prehistoric times, use this activity as a foundation when covering those river valley civilizations. This slideshow helps build a solid foundation you’ll likely return back to throughout the year!

Sorting Challenge

A fun activity your students can work on is this sorting challenge. It goes over all 6 parts of GRAPES, where students have a word bank and need to figure out which words go with each component. Any words left over that don’t fit in any category need to be used to decode a secret message. Of course, the secret message is a joke about grapes! This is a great activity to have your students practice their understanding of GRAPES before you dive into using them in your civilizations.

Create a Civilization Project

One of our favorite projects for Ancient Civilizations is to have students create a civilization of their own. We designed this civilization project to help students better understand the different pieces of a civilization by creating their own with GRAPES! They get to decide what kind of government they want to have, what goods are going to be part of their economy, and so much more. This allows students to understand the choices of each civilization and what factors affected them.

This project is very flexible in terms of when it can be done and the different ways to do it. You can have students work on it right after finishing up GRAPES and introducing what a civilization is, or with an early civilization like Mesopotamia. This can also be a great capstone project for the end of the year to have students apply what they’ve learned from different civilizations to help them make their choices that way.

Teaching Ancient Civilizations

When teaching any ancient civilization, it’s important to find new, fun ways to help students understand the content. If you liked any of our GRAPES activities, you’ll love our GRAPES Ancient Civilizations Bundle! This bundle contains all 5 resources we’ve mentioned in this post in one easy package to help you teach with GRAPES in your classroom!

As of 2024, we now have all of our Ancient Civilizations unit bundles available on our own website, which you can check out here. We believe the organization to be even better than how you can receive the files on TPT, and it also helps if your school district blocks Google Drive files from TPT!

If you liked this breakdown of teaching with GRAPES in your Ancient Civilization classroom, consider watching the corresponding video here. If you’re interested in our most recent Ancient Civilization activities, check out our post for Mesopotamia here.

Daily Agenda Slides for Middle School

Daily Agenda Slides

Have you ever used daily agenda slides before? Before using digital agenda slides, we used to handwrite our daily agendas on our whiteboards each morning. Once we switched to digital slides, we realized handwriting the agenda was such a waste of time, not to mention that we couldn’t refer back to agendas from the previous year. With digital agenda slide templates, you have endless design options that can be used however works best for you! In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits of using digital daily agendas, how to use them, and examples of how we’ve set them up.

Saving Time in the Classroom

Time is so precious in teaching, and that’s where digital agenda slides can be extremely helpful. You can prepare your agenda slides ahead of time, such as when you are lesson planning each week. They’re also great to refer back to when trying to remember old agendas from previous units or the year prior. It allows you to have an organized, written record with exact dates of lessons you taught. They’re helpful for your students as well, as you’re able to not only project it easily for the whole class, but also post the slides on Google Classroom! With agenda slides, you can prep them whenever, wherever, and you’ll always be able to edit them with ease.

Using Agenda Slide Templates

When it comes to using agenda slides, there are endless designs and ways to set them up, making them very flexible to fit your specific needs! They can be used for weekly overviews or daily tasks, such as bell ringers, announcements, reminders, etc. Because they are digital, you can edit the text as needed and change up the templates you want to use. Once you’ve decided how you want to set up your agenda, you can make copies of each slideshow for future reference. If you’re interested in learning more about how to use daily agenda slides, you can watch the corresponding video to this post here.

Agenda Slides by Theme

Depending on the look you have for your classroom, you may want to have agenda templates that match. If you’re looking for agenda slides that match your classroom, we’ve created many different themed templates! There are multiple themes to choose from, so you might even choose to change them up throughout the year. If you’re interested in checking out our template resources, take a look at our individual sets below!

Back to School Agenda Slides

Fall-Themed Agenda Slides

Winter-Themed Agenda Slides

Coffee Shop-Themed Agenda Slides

Plant-Themed Agenda Slides

Movie-Themed Agenda Slides

Travel-Themed Agenda Slides

World Geography-Themed Agenda Slides

US History-Themed Agenda Slides

Ancient Civilizations Agenda Slides

Along with our themed agenda slide templates, we’ve also created sets specifically for Ancient Civilizations Units. If you are a social studies teacher, these agenda slides are a perfect way to get your students more engaged during each unit while saving time. Our Ancient Civilizations agenda templates include Early Humans, Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome!

If you’re interested in all of these Ancient Civilizations Agenda Slides, check out our epic bundle or any of our individual sets below!

Ancient Egypt Agenda Slides

Ancient India Agenda Slides

Mesopotamia Agenda Slides

Ancient China Agenda Slides

Early Humans Agenda Slides

Ancient Greece Agenda Slides

Ancient Rome Agenda Slides

If you’re looking for more classroom tips to save time, this previous blog post covers other classroom forms that may be helpful in your classroom!

Early American History Word Wall: A How-To Guide

Early American History Word Wall

Have you ever used an Early American History word wall before? Word walls can be a helpful tool your students can use to remember and better understand the vocabulary words that connect with whatever historical topic you’re teaching. In this previous blog post, we’ve briefly discussed word walls, however, we wanted to give a more thorough guide on how to use them in this post, as well as share examples that pertain to early United States history.

Creating a Word Wall

The first step in creating a word wall is choosing which words to use and how you want each card to look. There are multiple ways to do this, depending on your preference. Some cards just have the word, some add a definition, and some include an image. In our teaching experience, we’ve found the most helpful cards use all three, which help support our visual learners. We like including definitions because it can create a “dictionary wall” that students can refer back to throughout the year. You can find examples of our word wall template here.

Once you have decided which words you will include, you will then decide how you want to organize them. You can see a few examples in the pictures below.

Vocab Word of The Day

To break up your Early American History vocabulary words into smaller, more doable pieces, consider our strategy of teaching one word per day. Going over the vocabulary words at a gradual pace will allow you to go into more depth with each word. You could even use this as part of your daily warm-up activity!

Organizing by Theme

Another option is to organize your words by theme. While teachers of younger students may organize words alphabetically, consider instead organizing by theme to help students make connections. For example, you might create categories of people, places, events, documents, and more! For your convenience, our Early American History Word Wall cards are color-coded by historical timeframe. So while using this method, students would still have a way to remember which word belongs to each historical point in time.

Early American Word Walls for Each Unit

The main method we’ve used in the past is breaking up our word walls by unit. This especially works well if you have limited wall space. Simply display the words for each Early United States History unit all at once on a bulletin board or area of your classroom. To make life easier, there’s usually a couple students who would love to help you change out the board once they’ve finished an assignment.

If you’re interested in checking out our Early American History word wall cards, check out our epic bundle or any of our individual sets below!

First Americans Word Wall

European Exploration Word Wall

Thirteen Colonies Word Wall

American Revolution Word Wall

Constitution Word Wall

New Nation Word Wall

Age of Jefferson Word Wall

Age of Jackson Word Wall

Industrial Revolution Word Wall

Age of Reform Word Wall

Sectionalism Word Wall

Civil War Word Wall

If you need to cover more topics of American history, we have a blog post featuring the second “half” that is available here.

15 Prehistory Activities for Middle School

Prehistory Activities

Teaching Prehistory

If you’re an Ancient Civilizations teacher and need some ideas for prehistory activities, you’re in the right place! We’ve compiled our top free and paid resources to help you have a successful Prehistory unit. We want to help you succeed, whether you use these as an outline or to help supplement your existing unit! All links and resources below are what we personally use in our Prehistory unit.

Prehistory Lesson Plans

Introductory Vocabulary Activities

Just like all of our units, we start them off with vocabulary-based activities. These vocabulary activities for Google Drive are fun ways for students to practice the Prehistory vocabulary words in a variety of ways. There is a matching activity, fill-in-the-blank activity, related word activity, Quizlet links, and everything else you might need for vocabulary!

Prehistory Word Wall

Along with our vocabulary activities, we always find that word walls are a great vocabulary tool! Our resource includes 30 Prehistory vocabulary words ready to print and display on a bulletin board. Because images are included on every card, they’re also helpful for your visual learners! There is also an editable Google Slideshow included with all of the words and images, so you can edit the definitions and present the words to your students or post them on Google Classroom!

Never used an ancient civilization word wall before? This blog post will teach you how to set up, organize, and use them effectively in your classroom!

Early Humans Google Slideshow

We find it helpful to share background information towards the start of the unit, so students can make connections during other activities. This 25-slide Google Slideshow provides a detailed overview of prehistory and the people who study it, the origins of humans, early human migration, and the Agricultural Revolution. This resource also includes helpful graphics and images to reinforce the information!

Prehistory & Early Humans Activity Sheet

We’ve created a basic, fun worksheet that provides engaging puzzles for students while also being low-key. It’s an easy thing to have ready in case you need an emergency sub plan or students finish classwork early! It contains 4 activities in total, such as a mystery word challenge and map activity on human migration. So if you need something on hand for that “just-in-case” situation, you can find it here. Simply print it double-sided and you’re good to go!

Hominid Jigsaw & Timeline

As we start discussing the different hominids during the unit, we’ve created this engaging jigsaw activity. With this activity, the students are divided into different groups for each hominid. Each group will then read a passage or do an activity about one topic in their group. After they’ve have finished gathering their information from that section, students who covered different topics must find other students to teach what they found. This allows students to see the pattern of how hominids changed over time and adapted up to modern civilization.

Prehistory & Early Humans Bell Ringers

If you’re looking to improve your classroom management and help students review material, these bell ringers are perfect! This set includes 20 Prehistory Bell Ringers for Google Drive that are 100% editable and ready to use. These warm-up prompts cover a variety of topics that come up in a prehistory unit while also building helpful skills! Topics covered in this resource include hominids, early human migration, the agricultural revolution, and more!

Question Formulation Technique (QFT): Lucy

The question formulation technique (QFT) is a great way to promote inquiry skills! In this QFT activity specifically, you’ll need to find an image of the famous Hominid Lucy to display without any other details. Your students will then have to generate their own questions based upon that image. It’s an awesome way to get students to learn how to formulate and work with their own questions and ideas!

Need more information about the QFT method? Visit the Right Question Institute for more details.

Early Human Migration

Human migration is one of our favorite topics during prehistory, and we’ve found two YouTube videos that cover it very well. The first video is from Science Insider, where they discuss all the different migration routes from Africa to the other continents. The second video comes from the American Museum of Natural History. It covers human migration while also showing how our population grew as we migrated and other changes throughout time. It goes through major historical events where our population skyrocketed or dropped and shows our trajectory up to the year 2100.

Human Migration Challenge

Along with our recommended videos, we’ve also created this engaging human migration challenge activity. With this inquiry-based activity, students must predict human migration routes from Africa using several clues. Once they’ve made their predictions, you can go over them using the provided slideshow and give additional details!

Out of Eden Walk

We like to connect ancient times to modern day when possible, and we’ve found two videos from National Geographic that work well. These videos cover Paul Salopek and his seven (plus) year journey on walking along the path of human migration. The first video is from 2012 and the second is from 2016, where he is going through the process of slow journalism and interacting with the different populations he comes across.

BCE/CE Guidelines

After getting through human migration and the hominids, we like to start discussing time terminology. We go through the differences between BCE/CE vs. BC/AD and the basics of how the historical timeline works. With that, we’ve designed a simple but effective timeline activity. During this activity, you will show the slideshow to give background, then students will make a timeline to apply their knowledge of time. This resource can also be useful for helping students understand the passage of time as you get into other civilizations throughout the year!

Stone Ages Instagram Activity

Once we’ve dealt with BCE/CE, we move into the stone age using this creative Stone Age activity and overview slideshow. To start this resource, present the slideshow to give your students background on the stone age. Students will then create a selection of Instagram-styled posts for the Paleolithic Era, Mesolithic Era, and the Neolithic Era. Each post will showcase what life was like during each time through images, captions, and hashtags.

Prehistory Survival Simulation

We find simulation activities extremely engaging and fun, so we created this prehistoric survival simulation. With this activity, students will try to “survive” prehistoric times by making decisions and earning points. They must choose where they will live, the type of shelter they will build, the skills they will have, and more. Along the way, students will learn how their choices could help or hurt their chances at survival, complete with information about what life was actually like! This is one of our students’ favorite prehistory activities, and helps them gain a better understanding of what early humans may have faced.

Otzi the Iceman Inquiry Activity

Otzi the Iceman is fascinating and students usually have a lot of questions, making it perfect for an inquiry activity! We’ve designed this inquiry activity to spark your student’s curiosity and work on critical thinking. During this activity, students view different pictures of Otzi and related artifacts to make predictions about him and his life. Once predictions have been completed, you and your students can go over the provided slideshow and discuss the significance of each photo in depth.

“Iceman Murder Mystery”- NOVA

A great addition to your discussion of Otzi the Iceman is this video from NOVA. It’s a great supplemental resource to add to the topic, especially when you have a more relaxing day of class or after a test. It’s also for purchase on Amazon.

Early Humans Test + Study Guide

At the end of your unit, you can assess your students using this Early Humans Test and Study Guide. The test is perfectly aligned to the other resources mentioned in this activity guide, 100% editable and available in 2 different formats: Google Forms (self-grading) and Google Docs. The day before the test, have a review day with the provided study guide, and then give the exam in whichever format works best for you!

Prehistory Printable Bookmarks

These printable Prehistory Bookmarks are a fun addition to your Early Humans unit! This set includes four different designs that feature images and clipart that are related to Prehistory. The bookmarks are 100% black and white so that students can color in the images or personalize them as they wish! These coloring bookmarks make a great prize, a short early finisher activity, or can even help students save time when using their textbooks!

Early Humans Daily Agenda Slides

Need a way to stay more organized during your Prehistory Unit? These Early Humans Daily Agenda Slides Templates will help you save time and better immerse your students in the unit! These slides for Google Drive are editable and each template features an early humans-themed photograph, as well as clipart. They can be used to share your daily agenda, bell ringers, and more!

If you have never used agenda slides, check out our recent blog post for more info on daily agenda slides!

Prehistory Civilization

When teaching any ancient civilization, it’s always important to have activities that make the content fun and engaging for students. If you liked any of our Prehistory activities, you’ll love our Prehistory Unit Bundle! This bundle contains 13 resources and is a great way to supplement your textbook or curriculum materials about Prehistory! We’ve had great success with these resources, and our students had a blast!

Looking for ideas and inspiration when planning your Mesopotamia unit? If so, this free Early Humans resource guide can help! It showcases each of our Mesopotamia resources to help you decide which options will be best for your students. For more details about how we fit these resources together and how long we spend on each activity, you can also download our free Early Humans unit plan!