Chilling Times Timeline

This lesson will guide students in creating a collaborative timeline about Cold War events.

Created by Elizabeth Phipps Governor General's History Awards Winner 2012 recipient of the Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Teaching and Heather Kevill — Posted February 4, 2025

Lesson Overview

Grade Level: 5/6

Subject Area: Social Studies, History

Time Required: 2 lessons

Magazine Issue: “Canada and the Cold War” (February 2025), Kayak: Canada’s History Magazine for Kids.

This lesson will guide students in creating a collaborative timeline following their reading of the article “Chilling Times.” Each student will receive a specific event from the article to summarize. To assist in organizing their thoughts, they will be provided with a template, which will later be attached to an extensive timeline crafted on a strip of bulletin board paper. The templates will encompass a summary, an illustration, and responses to questions about Indigenous communities and contemporary Canada.

Historical Thinking Concept(s)

  • Establish historical significance
  • Identify continuity and change
  • Analyze cause and consequence
  • Take historical perspectives

Learning Outcomes

Students will…
  • Read the article titled “Chilling Times.”
  • Summarize their assigned event by filling out the provided template.
  • Create an illustration to complement their summary.
  • Draw inferences regarding the impact of their assigned event.
  • Collaborate to create a timeline.

Lesson Activity

ACTIVATING
  • Students should be familiar with how to read and summarize informational texts.
  • Introduce students to the Cold War by having them read the article “New World, New Fight” on pages 4-5.
  • You can also present information about the Cold War through videos, articles, or podcasts (some suggestions are at the end of this lesson) and have students use the See-Think-Wonder strategy to activate their thinking.
ACQUIRING
  • Organize students into large groups (at least 5 students).
  • Assign a specific event from the article “Chilling Times” to each student within a group. Each group can be assigned a compilation of different events.

  • Task them with reading their section independently and summarizing the event. Students can fill out the template, which will require them to include the event’s date, a brief summary of the event, creating an illustration, and responding to questions about whether the event affected Indigenous communities and its impact on contemporary Canada.

APPLYING
  • Students will work together to assemble their sheets in chronological order and to create a timeline of the events they studied.
  • Ask each student to share their insights about their assigned event with their groupmates.
  • Display each group’s timeline to the rest of the class. Students can go around to learn about the events that they did not summarize and see how other students interpreted the impact of these events.

Materials/Resources

Additional resources to help activate students’ knowledge about the Cold War

Themes associated with this article

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