About this activity
Eight tasks that turn a news article into a timeline: read a short news article and draw a timeline of what happened, in order; mark where the article starts — does it begin at the beginning, or in the middle; draw what must have happened before the first event and label what you had to infer; draw two timelines of the same events, one from each side's point of view. Informational text rarely runs in chronological order, and noticing that is the skill.
How to use it in a session
Insist on the marking of where the article begins. News writing almost always starts in the middle or at the outcome and then backfills, and a student who assumes chronological order will build a wrong timeline from a correctly-read article. The two-perspectives card is the hardest and the most valuable, since it separates the sequence of events from the account of them. Twenty minutes covers one article with two or three tasks.
What to listen for
Watch what gets inferred. The card asking what must have happened before the article's first event is the one that exposes whether a student can distinguish stated from implied — and both are needed to build a timeline. Notice whether the three-most-important-moments card produces a justification or a shrug; the reasoning is the point rather than the choice.
Carrying it home
Any news story works. Asking where the story actually starts, against where the article starts, is a thirty-second question that changes how a student reads news for good.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Eighth through twelfth, using real informational text.
- Do I need an account?
- No, all eight tasks are free to use here.
- Why timelines rather than summaries?
- Because a timeline exposes ordering. A summary can be written from a misread sequence and still sound plausible; a timeline makes the order explicit and therefore checkable.