Time Maps From Knowledge Quest ~ Schoolhouse Review
Learn history with these fun interactive timeline maps! These are a perfect addition to your homeschool history lessons.
Watch history unfold with Time Maps from Knowledge Quest.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this product for review, all opinions are 100% my own.
Our family are big history buffs, so I was very excited to have the opportunity to review Time Maps from Knowledge Quest! I have used some of their other products in the past and enjoyed them very much.
My children are visual learners so I had a good feeling that they would love this product and I was right! Since we have been studying Rome, we started working with the Rise of the Roman Empire first.
It begins with the year 500 BC. Under the date box are two symbols "i" for information and "Q" for questions. Clicking the "i" gives you information about the time period in general. Clicking the "Q" gives you questions that can be used for study or review.
Around the map are other pictures and "i" symbols, clicking on these brings up boxes on the screen with more information on that place, person, or event. When you have finished exploring that time period you can click on the direction arrows in the top right corner to move forward or back.
It is really cool watching the map move and change! This is supposed to be for my children to use, but they have to share it with me! I'm enjoying this as much as they are.
Included with each map is a teacher's guide. This can be accessed through the main page of Time Maps or opened separately as a PDF file. The guide for the Rise of the Roman Empire was 20 pages.
It includes activities, questions for further study and discussion, timeline pages, and both a labeled map and a black line map to fill in.
Time Maps are available for the following studies.
Ancient China
Black Death
European Exploration
Rise of the Roman Empire
Fall of the Roman Empire
Rise of Islam
Atlantic Slave Trade
Time Maps are Flash programs requiring a free copy of Adobe Flash Player to be installed on your computer and run on Windows and Mac. While Knowledge Quest designed the software to run on Windows and Macs, Linux is my preferred system. The good news is I was easily able to get Time Maps to run on Linux!
To do this I needed WINE installed and the very helpful Wine Tricks program. These should be found in most Linux repos for an easy install. After installing them, go into Wine Tricks, then the "Install" menu. Scroll down to the "Extras" section and select Adobe Flash, then click Install.
When that is finished clicking on the Time Maps exe file should open it in a WINE window. This worked really well for us and saved me time from opening Windows XP in VirtualBox when I wanted to use Time Maps.
Time Maps is a wonderful program and I really struggled to find anything that I didn't like about it. My only suggestion would be that adding an audio player would make it much easier to use with younger students or students that struggle with reading.
