I wanted to kick off some work on the history curriculum, but where to start? The past is a very big place.
TED talks came to the rescue via Louise Leakey and her loo roll analogy. Armed with a roll of loo paper and a pack of stickers we started to try and gain a sense of scale. It was all very inexact but then when we're counting in millions and billions of years a few inches here or there doesn't much matter.
We begin in the kitchen, with the Big Bang. Appropriate as it is the scene of many unimaginable concoctions and explosions. We're roughly 14 billion years in the past which is unimaginably far away: "Were there cars then?" No darling, so we side step into the concept of nothingness.
We lasted about 20 seconds before our brains ached and so we carried on unrolling.
As we trek around the ground floor and then up the stairs we note that land formed, the first signs of life started to emerge and dinosaurs ruled - and we add stickers to mark each occasion. A few feet from the end of the roll and we mark the end of the dinosaurs, marvelling at the length of their dominance over millions of years.
Apes appear on our final sheet of toilet paper. We use the smallest stickers we can find in the last couple of millimetres to show the inauspicious arrival of homo-sapiens and our puny 200,000 years of human history.
The house was covered in loo roll and Bailey was happy to bounce around like a giant Andrex puppy. Big picture done and we're all set up to start zooming in on our next history topic.
For the most inspiring and addictive history of our past 14 billion years, head to http://histography.io/
For a rough guide to the universe on toilet paper -
http://www.earthintransition.org/2013/07/how-history-is-like-a-roll-of-toilet-paper/
