I was always interested in History, especially World History. It is always fascinating to me how we innovated and advanced, especially when I compare two different country’s history, I can really get a feel of the world at different times in different places. But I didn’t have time to learn a lot of history at the time, I mainly focused my time and energy on Math, English, Chinese and things like that. So my friends and I decided to focus our time and energy on History for a period of time and get a big picture of it. We decided to only do the big picture because if we go to deep into one topic we won’t have time to learn about the others, after all, going deep into a lot of topics can take YEARS to do – that’s the path to becoming historians!
One very interesting part of this project is that we didn’t start with human history, we spent most of the time, in the beginning, studying the history of the Universe, our Solar System, Earth, Life… It may sound like science – and it sort of is, it is also history, I learned not only there isn’t really a clear separation line between history and science, this works for other subjects too! We used a lot of books and also online courses to learn and we also did some activities (like debating on if switching to agriculture is a good thing or not) and I also had a notebook to keep track of the timeline of what happened when and what happened at the same time, in the middle of learning I even ran out of notebook paper and had to tape a new one to the old one!
My favorite part of this project is taking the notes and taking some of the histories I already learned (like Chinese History) and putting it on a timeline along with all of the new thing I learned and seeing the connections between them.
Even though this was a big part of the project it wasn’t finished yet, we decided to dedicate a wall for this project and drew a world map on the wall with a timeline on the bottom and put the events on the timeline while connecting it to places on the made with some colored tape. It took quite some time to make but it was definitely worth it and became one of the best-known walls in our house!