Transcontinental Railroad: Create a Timeline Activity

A helpful way for students to organize facts about the Transcontinental Railroad is in a timeline. This timeline highlights a few of the important dates from 1848 with the discovery of gold in California, through the lobbying and construction of the railroad, and goes up until 1882 with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. There are many important dates in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad that students can explore that can highlight a broad range of perspectives! In this activity, students will create a timeline of 5-10 events about the construction of the transcontinental railroad. These timelines can be printed and displayed around the classroom and used as a reference.

For an alternative to the timeline layout, have students create a timeline poster to incorporate into a presentation or gallery walk. You can add more than one template to this assignment to give students lots of options and adjust the instructions accordingly.

Due Date:

Objective: Create a timeline in chronological order with accurate dates, descriptions and illustrations for 5-10 important events relating to the Transcontinental Railroad.

Student Instructions:

1. Click “Start Assignment”.
2. Choose 5-10 important events related to the Transcontinental Railroad.
3. In the timeline template, click on “Timeline Dates”, and write the dates of each milestone in the date cells in chronological order. Then click “update timeline”.
4. For each cell, list a title and write a 1-3 sentence description for each event.
5. Create an illustration that represents each event using appropriate scenes, characters, and items.

Requirements: 5-10 events listed with correct dates, 1-3 sentence description, and appropriate illustrations.