Geologic Timeline

In February, our main lesson block topic is the Montessori Second Great Lesson: The Coming of Life. To begin, we first went over the formation and layers of the Earth, and then what was living on the planet during the Precambrian Time and the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic Periods.

To help students understand the scale for all of this, we looked back at the 2026 Timeline of Life calendars which we made in December.

On Thursday, the students wrote down their first, second, and third choices for their report topics. Each person will make a backboard for just one of the Geologic Periods. We will be spending the next two weeks on these, and then putting them all in chronological order for the parents to walk through at the History Fair!

Here, if you're not familiar with it, is the terminology for the time periods:

Eon	Era	Period	Epoch	Old Periods
Phanerozoic Eon 541 mya to Present	Cenozoic Era 66 mya to Present	Quaternary 2.58 mya to Present	Holocene .012 to present	Quaternary 2.58 mya to Present
			Pleistocene 2.58 to .012 mya
		Neogene 23 to2.58 mya	Pliocene 5.3 to 2.58 mya	Tertiary 66 to 2.58 mya
			Miocene 23 to 5.3 mya
		Paleogene 66 to 23 mya	Oligocene 34 to 23 mya
			Eocene 56 to 34 mya
			Paleocene 66 to 56 mya
	Mesozoic Era 252 mya to 66 mya	Cretaceous 145 mya to 66 mya
		Jurassic 201 to 145 mya
		Triassic 252 to 201 mya
	Paleozoic Era 541 to 252 mya	Permian 299 to 252 mya
		Carboniferous 359 to 299 mya
		Devonian 419 to 359 mya
		Silurian 444 to 419 mya
		Ordovician 485 to 444 mya
		Cambrian 541 to 485 mya
Precambrian Time 4,600 to 541 mya		Ediacaran Period 635 to 541 mya
	Proterozoic Era 2,500 to 541 mya
	Archaean 4,000 to 2,500 mya
	Hadean 4,600 to 4,000 mya

The links in the table above are to fossils-facts-and-finds.com, where you can learn about each section of time. The children will be using their books on Geologic Time for their research. There is one per period. Here is a FREE sample in PDF form: The Cretaceous Period. As a Montessori teacher, these books by Doug and Claudia Mann are invaluable! Illustrated by David Cobb.

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