Tool for helping clients build a timeline of their lives?

I find that something I want most often as a therapist is to help clients see their own lives as a timeline - and it helps me see some places that seem worth exploring.

I do this kind of thing in small ways all the time. For instance, if a client tells me that they started doing badly in school and getting into fights a lot in 6th grade, and I ask what else was going on in their lives around that time, it's amazing how often they realize that oh, right, that was the year that, say, their grandmother died and their mother was in and out of the hospital. (I'm completely making that up - I have never had a client with that history.) And a lot of the time it had never occurred to them to put those things together.

What I would love to do is build a timeline, and then keep adding to it as we identify more pivotal events or situations. I can't figure out any better way than just to draw a line across a piece of paper and start scribbling things in - and then it turns out to need a whole lot of pieces of paper lined up together and the whole thing becomes unwieldy.

What I'm hoping someone here can suggest is some tool that's engaging and intuitive enough that I can send clients home with it to start filling out on their own, and have some hope that they'll actually do it. (I'm not typically much of a homework kind of person.) Anyone have any ideas?