Read what THE GAME REPORT says:...............................................................”A big winner.”


See what a homeschool parent says:..........................................How Perspective helps you learn!


Read about the inventor:..................................................................”I was a bad history student.”

How To Order:..................................................................................................................Call now

Magazine Says:

“Rarely has a family (dare I say trivia?) game with such a fresh perspective (forgive me) come my way. If the reaction of the people in my game class is any indication, Perspective has all the makings of a big winner.
One reason why Perspective is so much fun is that it doesn’t require specificity of knowledge. Having a vague sense of when events happened is enough to let you win. And even if you’re not sure, a confident bluff can fool opponents into thinking you are. It’s a terrific game for kibbitzers--how delightful to walk into the room, scan the board, announce that you see an error and walk away!”

Peter Sarrett, Editor

A Homeschool Parent’s Review
by Mary O’Keefe, mother of National Spelling Bee Finalist, Alison Miller


Perspective...The Time Line Game...as shown on CBS Evening News

We recently discovered a new game that's been a great hit for the kids AND parents.
When I saw the description in Rebecca Rupp's new "Home Learning
Sourcebook" (a dangerous book--full of temptations!), I had a hunch the kids
would love it. What I didn't realize was that I would love it too! Even
Ross, who rarely enjoys board games with the kids (he prefers Miniature
Golf!), thought this one was fun.

The board game is called "Perspective" and there are hundreds of cards with
historic events on them, starting with the Big Bang and going through to the
1990s. At the beginning of the game, each player is dealt six cards and the
object of the game is to get rid of all your cards by placing them in a
time-line in historical order on the game board. This is harder than it
sounds because you have to roll a die on each turn which could result in
having to draw additional cards.

Also, if another player thinks you placed your most recent card out of
order, he/she can challenge you. Successful challenges allow the challenger
to give one of his cards to the person challenged (of course, this is a good
way to unload your tricky cards!) but if you challenge and you're wrong, the
person you challenged gives a card to you. The kids love challenging me and
discovering that they are often right and I'm wrong. I've also been known
to challenge them and it turns out that they were right and I shouldn't have
challenged them. They love it!

It's lively and it's not just rote memorization. There's a surprising
amount of reasoning that goes on in figuring out where to place cards.
(E.g., I didn't know the date of Grant Wood's "American Gothic", but it
seemed like the sort of thing that would have been painted in the
Depression--sure enough, it turned out to be 1930.) By the way, the dates
are printed on the back of the cards, which makes challenges easy to check.

You don't need to know absolute dates in this game--just the sequence of
events. So, for example, someone had already played a card "The Great
Depression begins on Black Friday in this year" (1929) and someone else had
already played a card for "Winston Churchill gives his famous 'Iron Curtain'
speech", which I knew had to be after World War II, so my insight into Grant
Wood's artistic style was good enough to guess that the "American Gothic"
card belonged between the two.

The first few rounds are easy, because there are not many cards on the board
yet so it's easy to place them. (Also, there is a color coding on the cards
that divides events into "Ancient" (beginning of time to the fall of the
Rome), "Middle" (477 to 1588), "Modern" (1589 to 1900), and "Twentieth
Century". As the time lines starts to fill up, it gets trickier and
trickier to figure out where the next card goes.

We have several books and posters with timelines and the kids find them
interesting browsing, but this game brings out so much more active thinking.
It's great fun for all of us, including the adults, dusting off those
cobwebs and thinking about whether the Moors invaded Spain before or after
the Vikings discovered Iceland, and then where does the Book of Kells fit in
or the Taj Mahal or Technotitlian? Did Sophocles come before or after
Buddha? There's something very Montessori-like about this game, although
the randomness aspects (rolling the die each time which might say--"Give one
card to another player" or "Draw another card from the deck" or "Lose your
turn") add a different kind of non-Montessori excitement to the enterprise
and smooth out the advantages due to differences in knowledge among the
players.

Although our family definitely enjoys the friendly competition and the
winner definitely enjoys the privilege of winning, we've also developed a
nice cooperative ending to the game. When it ends, we turn over all the
cards and see whether we collectively managed to create a perfect time-line.
So this means that a successful challenge not only advances the player who
issued it at the expense of the player who was challenged, but the
successful challenge also advances the cause of creating a correct overall
end-of-game collective timeline.

I realize, of course, that there's a lot more to history than just dates and
brief descriptions, but it's really helpful to have a framework to "hang
things on" and this game seems like a great way to develop one.

Oh, one more thing--this game isn't like Monopoly. It only takes maybe 15
to 20 minutes or so to play a complete game. (The only problem is that it
is addictive, and so it's hard to stop after just one game! We've played it
for literally hours. Each time, we've agreed at the end of a game, "Well,
let's just play one more game tonight," but then we go on to play another
and another and another. It's like the potato chip commercial--betcha can't
play just one!)

About the Inventor:

Linda Romero

“I was a bad history student. I never could grasp the order of things. One year in school, we’d study the middle ages. The next year, it would be dinosaurs. Still the following year, we learned about Classical Greece. I grew up thinking that this was the order in which history happened! First the knights, then Tyrannasaurus Rex, and Socrates last of all!
A generation later when my own child was in school, little had changed. There was little attempt to help children understand the order of history. There was still emphasis on unrelated, difficult-to-learn dates. Kids were still having trouble fitting the picture together.
So we made a game out of it. We created playing cards that described the things he was studying in school--Neanderthal Man, the voyage of Magellan, the Civil War, The Boston Tea Party, Sputnik--all the names that came up during the course of his public school education. We wrote the dates on the back of the cards. Then, we spent hours trying to put the cards in order, talking about how one event often leads to another, about how history really makes sense after all.
Perspective...The Time Line Game was born, and with it, a lifelong interest in history.”

How To Order:

Send your check for $30 to:

Perspective...The Time Line Game
837 Sopris Avenue
Carbondale, CO 81623


branch@sopris.net
Phone Number: (970) 963-9371
Fax Number: (970) 963-9371

Credit Card Orders: 800-255-8629 (shipping and handling extra on credit card orders)






Back To the Top

This Home Page was created with
AppleWorks 5