Sunday, November 17, 2019

Bringing the "Timeline of Life" to Life with Pictures!

My Science Club group is working on the Montessori Second Great Lesson, "The Timeline of Life," and we are doing a big multi-step art project which I can't share more details of here because it involves making parent gifts. However, I will share some of the resources I've found for bringing the mind-numbing concept of Geologic Time to life.

I struggle every year with how to make this accessible. The more detail, the more helpful, but too much detail in too short of a space of time just becomes a blur. I still haven't figured out perfectly how to chunk it up into multiple presentations, but I have been working hard to create a list of visuals for this lesson. I began with the resources usually recommended to Montessori teachers (and available from Montessori Services): the Geologic Periods book set and Timeline of Life Fossil Collection. I love these books!!!


by Doug and Claudia Mann
illustrated by David Cobb


I put a letter on the back of each book in order from A to M and labeled the little cards inside each fossil baggie with the same letters, so that I could easily grab the fossils which went with the time period we were discussing.


Since then, I've found a few books with illustrations which were helpful for these time periods. And then I was THRILLED to discover that Steve Jenkins -- my absolute favorite Science picture book author, both for his non-fiction content and his amazing paper collage illustrations -- has two books with prehistoric animals. I've just spent my morning going through them and writing which time period each lived in and making corresponding notes in the front of my little Geologic Periods books. Now, whenever I pick one up, I can look in the front and find what books have gorgeous full-color illustrations of animals that lived at that time and what fossils I own as well.


Prehistoric Actual Size
by Steve Jenkins


Apex Predators:
The World's Deadliest Hunters, Past and Present
by Steve Jenkins

Here is what I have so far; if you know of other suggestions, please share!

The Precambrian Time


The Cambrian Period


The Ordovician Period

    fossil bryozoans


The Silurian Period


The Devonian Period


The Carboniferous Period


The Permian Period


The Triassic Period


The Jurassic Period


The Cretaceous Period


Meet Sachi, Ido and Ulla:
SIU students name baby dinosaurs in geology program


The Paleogene Period

    three pieces of amber with inclusions (these I got on Etsy)
    insect - cockroach
    two insects - mosquito, ant
    cluster of insects - aphids

    Leptictidium - Prehistoric Actual Size

    Titanboa - Apex Predators


The Neogene Period


The Quaternary Period

    woolly mammoth hair - IDNR Trunk

    woolly mammoth tusk ivory - IDNR Trunk

    woolly mammoth tooth cast Mammuthus primigenius - IDNR Trunk

    mastodon tooth cast Mammut americanum - IDNR Trunk

    giant short-faced bear - Apex Predators


The Resource Trunks from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources are excellent and completely free to borrow. We get ours through the visitor center at Giant City State Park. This one is called People and Animals from Illinois' Past (link is to a PDF with full checklist of its contents). There is also an Illinois Fossils Trunk which we have checked out in the past and enjoyed.


This post contains affiliate links to materials I truly use for homeschooling. Qualifying purchases provide me with revenue. Thank you for your support!

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