The Time Chronicles – Mushroom Education

About this project

This is a listening project for middle school EFL students with English level B1 to B2. The images are from the Oxford Reading Tree series The Time Chronicles, which is about a group of children (Biff, Chip, Kipper and their friends) who become a time-travelling team. In the stories, the children have to complete missions which involve travel to important moments in history. Many of the books contain some information about that period of history and these extracts are read aloud in the audio files on this page.

Do you want to know about the mysterious man who organises children into a time-travelling team? Why does he ask children to do this work? Who are the bad guys in the story? Would you like to know about the machine that enables the children to move through time? You can hear about these things in this short extract from the second book in the Time Chronicles series: Beyond the Door

Note: The word Virans is just a name (you don’t need to learn this word). The Virans are the bad guys in the story. They try to disrupt time which is why the children have to go on time-travelling missions to stop them.

The Task:

Your task is to travel through time using Mortlock’s technology to learn about the culture in different places and times. Using the buttons below, you can choose a period of history, listen to the audio files and write notes about what you hear in your time-travelling journal. Are there any clues about the culture in these places and times? What do you think it would be like to have lived in these cultures? Maybe you can do some research to find out more about these periods or events.

Leonardo Di Vinci

This extract is from the third book in the series: The Jewel in the Hub

Johannes Gutenberg

This extract is from the fourth book in the series: The Matrix Mission

Michael Faraday

This extract is from the fifth book in the series: The Power of the Cell

You can watch documentaries about similar developments in science and engineering here.

Rome

This extract is from the seventh book in the series: Time Runners

The Age of Science

This extract is from the eighth book in the series: Tyler: His Story

You can watch documentaries about similar developments in science and engineering here. One of my favourite paintings explores the theme of The Age of Science. You can read about An Experiment with a Bird in an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby and learn more about the cultural values in England at that time.

Elizabethan Theatre

This extract is from the ninth book in the series: A Jack and Three Queens