Developing Sequencing Skills

Sequencing is the process of putting events, objects and ideas in a logical order. It's a skill that we use throughout the day, often without even knowing it. For adults, it is second nature. For many students, it is something they need to practice. It needs to be taught explicitly. It needs to be regarded as a thinking process that can be broadly applied across many areas. In school though, it is usually taught as simply the ordering of facts and information. This rote memorization reduces sequencing to lower order thinking.

Sequencing contributes to students' ability to understand and develop their reading comprehension. It is a valuable tool for identifying the components of a story, examining the structure and retelling the story. Through an examination of sequencing in narrative texts, students also hone their writing skills. When applied to mathematics, it can be used in timelines. Just to refresh your memory, a timeline is a way of displaying a list of events in chronological order, sometimes described as a project artifact. It is typically a graphic design showing a long bar labelled with dates alongside itself and usually events are labelled on points where they would have happened (from Wikipedia).



Timeline Creators