We have been exploring the girls’ personal histories over the past month. It has been great fun looking through the baby books and photo albums and mementos (like preschool artwork and baby dresses!).
As part of our personal history study, the girls have been creating timelines of their own lives so far. We began by brainstorming ideas of things to include on a timeline – birthdate, firsts (first camping trip, first day of school, etc.), siblings’ birthdates, lost teeth, favorite trips, etc. We used our scrapbooks (and my memory!) to get approximate dates for our items, then got to work constructing our timelines.
We wrote our timeline events on labels (so any mistakes we easy to fix!) and found photos to go with some of the events.
When we added an event to the timeline, we talked about approximately where that month would be in the year – great practice for my five-year-old, especially!
I think this has been one of the girls’ favorite projects this year! They are looking forward to adding on to their timelines each year.
We’re planning to write and illustrate simple autobiographies next. We’ve read a lot of great biographies written for kids, but no autobiographies. Any recommendations on kid-friendly autobiographies? I’m thinking of trying one about Bill Peet
Any other ideas on exploring personal history, autobiographies, and timelines would be most welcome! 
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I love this idea!
Great idea! How about one of these?
http://info.infosoup.org/lists/AutobiographyForKids.asp
I’m absolutely planning to do this with my daughters–thanks for the idea! My four year old is fascinated with knowing when things happened, when people were born, what happened first, etc. She will love this. I could see doing this both for short term things (like remembering a recent vacation) as well as long term things (from birth, for example).
great idea!
THANK YOU for sharing this wonderful idea! I know my children will love it, and it helps me to get excited about kicking off the new school year in a few months!
This is fantastic!! I really hope you’ll come over to my blog and add this post to our Linky Party today for the Smart Summer All About Me Challenge! Lots of moms and teachers are sharing and getting great ideas from each other. Bonus – We’ve got fun prizes!! : )
Fondly,
Pink and Green Mama
MaryLea
Hooray! Thanks for linking up and sharing this with the Smart Summer Challenge!
Fondly,
pink and green mama
MaryLea
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