This paper reports on a study that represents a new approach to understanding early and middle grade children's development of historical time awareness. The study sought to embed children's time awareness in a sociocultural framework, and to move beyond linguistic symbol systems to incorporate visual data sources. The researchers began with three assumptions: (1) people make sense of and to one another to the extent that they share ways of making meanings; (2) people from different communities tend to have different ways of making meaning so that historians, as a community, tend to make sense out of historical data differently than physicists might; and (3) if educators are to communicate with children about history, they need to understand children's sense making in this area. The paper argues, in conclusion, that history, especially for children, is not a single domain. Rather, history is made up of intersecting domains, each marked by semiotic practices that provide the context against which, history, whether written, oral, or visual, is recognizable and meaningful. In order to better understand children's thinking about time specific historical material, the study drew on a cross disciplinary framework, relating social semiotics, film, and media theory to the small body of work on children's historical/chronological thinking already extant. An appendix of nine historical photographs, and an appendix outlining interview protocol conclude the paper. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/DK)