The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old.
The Earth took 4.6 billion years to form. How do you get middle school students to comprehend this large amount of time? Create a long paper timeline to give your students a visual for the history of the Earth. Use a football field to get your students excited about the major geological dates of the Earth. Have your students use a 12-hour clock to understand the different geological eras.
46 Sheets of Paper
Write a list on the board or hand out worksheets with a list of relevant geological eras and dates throughout the Earth's geological history. Ask for student volunteers to tape 46 sheets of plain office paper of the same size together. You may have the students get into groups to do this. After you have the whole strip of paper together, tell the class that each sheet of paper represents 100 million years. Have student groups write or decorate special dates on the timeline from their worksheet or from the dates on the board. For example, you may want the students to designate that about 500 million years ago, oxygen began to expand in the atmosphere.
Football Field
Take your students out to a full-scale football field. Designate one end zone as "Today" and the other end zone as "When the Earth was Formed." Tell your students that each yard represents 46 million years. Divide the students into teams and give them worksheets with information and instructions to figure out where to designate on the football field where certain eras or different dates happened.
Tick, Tock
Show a large 12-hour clock to your class. Tell your students you are going to compare the geological eras from the 4.6 billion years of Earth's history to a 12-hour time period. Each hour is equivalent to 375 million years. Prepare a worksheet where the students have to figure out how long each era was if they have comparative lengths of time from the clock. For example, on their worksheet you may ask for the length of the Cenozoic period which lasted an equivalent of 10 minutes on a 12-hour time period. Through basic mathematics your students can find out that the Cenozoic lasted for around 65 million years.
Tags: your students, million years, billion years, football field, geological eras, years Earth
