River Timeline

Wednesday and Friday this week we continued our focus on the Delaware River, but this time looked at the timeline of who was here and how it was used. We started off by doing a guided reading of (help me out Cindy- I forget the title and author!) 

As we read the book aloud as a class, Cindy and I would stop and explain any terms we thought were hard to understand. The children each had 4 post-it notes to take notes for the 4 periods of time we would be discussing. On the board I created a similar timeline showing the 4 time periods of Indians, Settlers, Industrial, and Modern. As we moved through the book, we wrote notes on the board under each time period. I also had a strip of paper folded in 4 to visually illustrate the changes in the landscape and the river over time.

With Wednesday being a half day, the children were a bit distractible, and it took longer than I expected to get through the guided reading. We had just enough time at the end to pass out the folded accordion book pages for the students to put their names and post-it notes into.

Friday was more productive. With the paper strip timeline up on the board, we reviewed the special information about each time period. The students remembered quite a bit! We also brainstormed some various ways to represent trees, tree stumps, wigwams, farms, houses, factories, and inventions to create a visual timeline in our books as background and illustration for the text. The students were allowed to use colored pencil or crayon to draw their symbols. We started off with the river representing the timeline down the center of the book, and with the color changing on the third page to show how dirty the river got during the industrial revolution. While students were working, Cindy and I circulated the room, encouraging students to fill the pages, asking them how they were representing their ideas, helping them if they got stuck, etc.

It's interesting to see how wide the range of artistic development there is among the students. Some of them followed directions and used the images as symbols, like on a map.

Mary's visual timeline

Brooke's timeline with symbols

Other students took a more pictorial approach, drawing scenes along their timeline. 

 

Samia's scenic timeline

 

Angelica got engrossed in details in the wigwams and horse

Isaiah's is between symbolic and scenic

Next time we'll copy sentences describing each time period onto sticker labels to insert on each page and bind our books with covers.