A few months ago, I bought the Giant Timeline Poster from Charlie’s Playhouse. I wanted to get the Giant Timeline, but I knew I didn’t have room for it (though I know better now!) and figured I could hang the smaller version on the wall somewhere so my daughter and I could have fun reading it and checking out all the crazy creatures on it. It was a great plan, but it turns out that there are very few 12-foot empty spaces on the walls in my house, so we had to unroll it on the floor.
Fortunately, that didn’t matter much and my daughter and I had a blast taking the entire evolutionary journey using the timeline as a guide. It’s a great product and made explaining evolution simple, straightforward, and fun for my daughter (who is eight years old).
A couple months after that, I bought the Ancient Creature Cards to add to the fun. The cards are huge (5.5 x 8.5) and have the same creatures that are on the timeline, but with more information about each one. My daughter took them in the car and would go through them, ordering them by period or by appearance on long drives and cracking jokes about the weirder critters. She’d still play her Nintendo DS, of course, but it was great to see her so enthusiastic about the cards, too!
Today, we got out both products and stretched out the timeline on the floor and went through the cards one by one, reading about each creature and then finding its place on the timeline, matching the card with its time period. This was all at my daughter’s request, by the way, which says volumes about the products!
Here is the resulting layout (click to embiggen)…
If you’ve got kids, I highly recommend these products! They’re educational and fun, which is an unbeatable combination.
Kudos to the Charlie’s Playhouse folks!