Thursday, February 9, 2012

The History of the Earth: A Lesson Plan for 8-9 year olds

Well, I've started a new round of Co-op classes. This time I volunteered to do a short five days on Geology. Our first lesson yesterday was to answer two questions, "What is Geology?" and "What is the history of the Earth?". I'll include a list of great resources for this topic shortly, but first I want to share what we did for the majority of the class. 

Each kid (there were 8 of them) got their own 5 meter long roll of paper which I had prepared with a line down the middle and some pertinent dates. They turned these into timelines of the history of the Earth starting from the Earth's formation and ending with the present day. I had pre-ordered some stickers to make this more fun, and we spent the entire class reconstructing the Earth's history. Since we only had a limited amount of time, I only had them write down the names of the Eras and Periods and a few major things about those periods. For instance, we wrote "Oxygen!" during the Archean Era, when Stromatolites were creating our oxygen atmosphere. There are a few things I loved about this approach. One is that they get a real physical and visual picture of the Earth's history (and how very little of that time has included mammals and humans) and we were able to go bit by bit and try to get the evolution of it all in chronological order. There are many things I did not get to cover with them that I actually had on my own timeline, mass extinctions, and the like, but I think it was enough to get them going and excited about these questions. Some kids needed help with writing some of the big words, but most did just fine. These pictures are of my prototype timeline.




























As far as books go, I didn't find a great deal on this topic that were particularly inspiring, but I did have couple. Here are some decent books discussing this topic:

From Lava to Life: Book Two of The Universe Tells Our Earth Story by Jennifer Morgan and Illustrated by Dana Lynne Andersen. This is a marvelous book that tells the history of the earth as a story, keeping a sense of wonder because the earth is telling it's own story. The love this whole series, but this is the one that deals with early Earth.

The Atlas of Geology and Landforms by Cally Oldershaw has some pretty good pictures and diagrams and a decent overview.

A couple of great videos I highly recommend:

How the Earth Was Made by the History Channel. I watched a couple of different videos and this was the best one. Interesting graphics, pictures, and interviews. It's well done... interesting and not overly dramatic (I HATE that in a documentary.).

Earth Science: 100 Greatest Discoveries with Bill Nye. This is more about how we know what we know. Being Bill Nye, it's hard to get, but I was able to rent it from A+ Video

Online, here are some great sites:

BBC Prehistoric Earth. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/history_of_the_earth. This is an awesome website with information, great pictures and it's all laid out clearly and simply. 


Geologic time clock: http://www.fossilmuseum.net/geologictime/geologic-time-clock.htm


I got the idea for the time line from here, though I did embellish it a bit: http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~museum/hughes/MakingTimeLine.pdf

Other materials:
You will need a large roll of art paper. I just happened to have a roll on hand and it was the more expensive white variety, but you could also use butcher paper, or as suggested in the original plan, adding machine tape.

I was able to get all of my rather unusual stickers from Zazzle, but it was a little pricey. You could always just draw little pictures, but I thought it added an element of fun.

You will also need a meter stick and some smaller rulers with centimeters on it.

I don't know who said that the best way to learn something is to teach it, but they are certainly right! I've learned a lot already, and it's only been the first class! Next week it will be Earth structure and Plate Tectonics. In the meantime, I'm reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and enjoying it immensely.

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