Is A Chronological Card Placement Game Useful For History Review? A Classroom Teacher’s Take
The fluorescent lights in my 8th grade history room were already buzzing extra loud last month, fifth period on the Friday before spring break. Half the class was staring out the window at the cherry blossoms dropping petals on the soccer field, and the other half was doodling fake tattoos on their hands in the margins of their notebooks. We had a Civil War unit test coming up on Monday, and I just couldn’t bring myself to pull up the same Kahoot review we’d done for the last three tests. The loud kids would yell out answers before anyone else had time to think, the quiet kids would zone out on their phones under their desks, and by the end half of them still couldn’t tell me what order the major events happened in. So I grabbed the stack of index card cutouts I’d thrown together the night before, passed them out to groups of three, and asked them to lay every card out on their desk in chronological order.
I didn’t give much more instruction than that. Each card just had one event scrawled on it: Lincoln’s Election, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Published, Fort Sumter Attacked, Bleeding Kansas, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg, Appomattox Surrender, that kind of thing. Ten cards per group. Within two minutes, every group was arguing. Javi, who usually spends the whole period drawing airplanes and turning in half-empty worksheets, was leaning across his desk holding the Lincoln card, saying, “No way Fort Sumter was first, he had to get elected before the states seceded.” His group mate Jake shot back that he remembered his dad saying the attack on Fort Sumter started the war, so that had to be first. Instead of raising their hand to ask me, Javi pulled out his notebook and flipped back to the notes we’d taken three weeks earlier, turning the page so fast I thought he’d tear it. That’s when I realized I’d accidentally made something that worked better than I planned.
Lila, who rarely speaks up even when I call on her, was sorting her group’s cards and pointing out that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had to come first, because it made more people hate slavery, which led to everything else. She’d done an extra credit report on Harriet Beecher Stowe, so she knew the date off the top of her head, and suddenly she was leading the whole group. No one was sitting back this time. Even the kid who never turns in homework was sorting cards and pointing out what he remembered.
I’ve spent a lot of years trying different review activities, and most of them have the same problem. Whole class review leaves half the kids disengaged. Worksheets get half done, and kids just copy answers from their friend. This was different. Chronological order isn’t just about memorizing dates, after all. If you can’t sort events into the right order, you can’t see how one thing leads to the next. That’s the whole point of history, right? It’s not a list of random facts to memorize, it’s a sequence of causes and effects. When kids are placing cards themselves, they have to work through those connections instead of just memorizing the order from a textbook list.
It’s also almost no work to make. I used old index cards I had in my desk, and it took me 10 minutes to write all the events out after school one day. For parents helping their kid study for a history test at home, it’s even easier. Just grab a stack of sticky notes or cut up pieces of notebook paper, write down 10 to 15 key events from their unit, and have them lay them out in order. You don’t even need to know the right order yourself—after they sort them, they can check against their textbook or review sheet. It takes 15 minutes, it’s way more engaging than quizzing them off a list, and it lets them work through gaps in their memory on their own.
It’s not perfect, of course. The first time I did it, three groups finished 10 minutes early, and I didn’t have anything extra for them to do, so they started throwing erasers at each other. Now I keep an extra set of cards with more minor events on hand for fast-finishing groups. It also doesn’t work for every unit. If you’re reviewing a thematic unit like “different forms of government in ancient civilizations” that doesn’t have a clear chronological flow, it falls flat. And it’s only a review activity—you can’t use it to teach new content, because if kids don’t already have a basic idea what each event is, it just becomes a guessing game.
After we finished the activity and went over the order as a class, I graded the unit tests on Monday. Last year, when I did the same Civil War unit with the same textbook and just used a review worksheet and Jeopardy, 40% of the class got the ordering question wrong, where they had to put four major events in sequence. This year, only 16% got it wrong. That’s a big jump, but I can’t say for sure it’s the game. Kids were more engaged that Friday than they usually are, maybe the cherry blossoms put them in a better mood, maybe the test was slightly easier. But I can say that more kids were participating than in any other review activity I’ve done that semester.
I’m using it next month for our civil rights movement unit, and I’m adding a small twist: after groups sort their cards, each kid has to pick two adjacent events and explain how one caused the other to their group. It’s still a work in progress. It’s not going to replace all my other review activities, but it’s going to stay in my rotation. It’s cheap, it’s low-fuss, and it gets kids talking about history instead of just memorizing it. I’m still curious what other teachers and parents think—have you tried something similar, and did you see the same results?
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