The timeline

How can we explain the concept of time to children?

One of the biggest difficulties in finding a learning strategy is that time is invisible. Observing one’s own growth and that of one’s friends can be a valid expedient to represent in the past and in the contemporaneity this elusive entity.

Performance

1) Warming up
We start this workshop playing “keep-away” and then in pairs keeping the ball in balance on a sheet in order to warm our body with movement and laughter.

2) The time line
We can then move on to the central question of the day:
what is a timeline?
After sketching out some possible answers, the children filled out their personal timeline by marking the salient events from birth to the present on a strip of paper so that they could also arrange them graphically in succession.

3) Kamishibai
Once the time line is finished it is represented in the form of a conceptual map that, with the help of kamishibai, they can present to the companions in a discursive form.