20th Century Chart

This summer I attended our local Charlotte Mason mini conference which recapped several wonderful sessions given during the Childlight conference earlier. One of the recaps was in regards to paper trails...the art of Mason's notebooks.

We have dabbled in a variety of notebooks here. Some more successful than others but my older children still struggled with the idea of keeping a notebook for history. Then I learned about Miss Beale's Century Chart and was intrigued. So this month I have been reading and creating my own.

The premise of a century chart is a 10 x 10 grid that represents one century. The example below shows a chart of the 16th century and the key that goes with it.

Examples of Miss Beale's Century Chart


Key to the 16th Century Chart



As you can see each block is not crammed full of information but rather the child selects what is important to him. Another thing that intrigues me is that not every block is filled up. Investigating further I read that the children might have a science century chart as shown below.


This year we are doing TOG Year 4 which looks at the 20th Century so what better way to help my children understand the century than to ask them to build their own century chart. In my next post I will show you how I chose to do this with my three learning levels: 3rd grade; 8th grade; and 12th grade.

Tweet