Our History theme has been the First World War and one of the things that has bugged us a bit was how hard it was to find a good, brief summary of the key dates (free to download summary) so we ended up creating our own.

Our first version was a handwritten poster.

But we decided that it was actually really useful so we typed it up – nothing fancy just the dates and significant events in the order that they occurred. And we created a colourful version and a printer friendly version (i.e. less colourful for those days when your ink is running low).

Here are the Free downloads, please download for your own use.

And then because we like using sorting cards as a way of remembering facts we also created a set of significant event cards. With this set we did not include the dates, just a brief description of what happened. I felt that including the dates would have made it too easy as I wanted the kids sort the events without hints.

Here is the file

I have included the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as the trigger event for World War One but I have not included cards which mention the slow build up (eg Franco-Prussian war, arms race etc).

I have also not included when some of the smaller countries joined, I have just focused on the main countries. It is just a case of me trying to summarize events and not make it too long and detailed.

I hope some of you find our summaries useful. But please do NOT repost these documents on your site and claim them as your own. They were created by us for users to download directly from the ofamily learning together site.