Book of Centuries

Part of growing up is learning to understand the scope of time.  It is a very tricky concept for little people.  Add in using two different calendar systems with very different years and it becomes even more tricky.  Froggy is fighting a hard battle.

To help her, we recently set up a Book of Centuries.  We have slowly over time added more Charlotte

Mason techniques to our learning program and this is the newest.  Unlike the method she describes, our book has the Gregorian century dates on the left hand side of the spread and the Hebrew dates on the right hand side.  With each entry I record both dates.  We use two different color inks, black for real events (ex General George Washington crosses the Delaware River.) and fluorescent teal for fictional events (ex Jack and Annie meet General Washington)

Froggy is young for a Book of Centuries so we do this together and I do all the writing.  I hesitated starting this so early but needed a tool to help answer the questions she was asking.  This is a visual manner for her to see the comparison between the events she was trying to organize in her mind.  It also provides a very clear visual method to remind her who is real and who is fictional which is a serious challenge for a little reading historical fiction.

So far it is working great and Froggy asks to put new information in it regularly.


Come and share your adventures in time and space at History/Geography Exchange at Children Grow, Children Explore, Children Learn. 

p.s. The Book of Centuries is not ours. I have not been able to take a usable picture of our book yet.  This is an example from the Charlotte Mason site.