Students create a museum exhibit of the history of the Earth (including eras, fossil record, mass extinctions) using CoSpaces and view in VR with phones and goggles.

This parent guide supports parents in helping their child at home with the 8th grade Science content.

This resource accompanies our Rethink 8th Grade Science course. It includes ideas for use, ways to support exceptional children, ways to extend learning, digital resources and tools, tips for supporting English Language Learners and students with visual and hearing impairments. There are also ideas for offline learning. 

In this activity, each collaborative group of students is given a sample of sand and asked to determine how old the sand is by keying out "fossils" (plastic animals) the sand contains. Once each group has dated their sand, groups will work together to stack all the containers of sand in order from oldest to youngest.

Students will watch a short film about the Cambrian Explosion and the extraordinary fossils of the Burgess Shale. Students will address preconceptions and misconceptions about early Cambrian life, and complete a timeline activity that will enable them to better appreciate just how recently - relatively speaking - multicellular life evolved on Earth.

In this simulation activity, students take virtual coral samples and use radiometirc dating techniques to calculate the age of the living and dead corals in the sample area. They will then use this information to determine the environmental conditions on the seamount.

Students will simulate radioactive dating by investigating the ratio of popped and unpopped kernels when microwaved for varying amounts of time

This resource is an article, complete with images, explaining radiometric and relative dating methods used by geologists.

This multimedia resource, part of the NC Science Now series, describes how a paleontologist and her team of volunteers have uncovered the remains of a new type of dinosaur. Evidence suggests that the desert mountains in Utah, where the bones were found, was once a lush wetland. Researchers use specific methods to carefully uncover the details of not only what the world was like in the past but also how this individual lives, died, and rotted. Components of this resource include a video and a related blog article. Links to these components are provided on the page under the heading "UNC-TV Media."

In this lesson, students explain how fossils provide important evidence of how life and environmental conditions have changed.

Hyperdoc covering the Earth's Layers. There are videos, graphics, and questions to respond to. There is also practice content problems and a quiz on Google Forms to complete.

For both the hyperdoc and the Google Form you need to "Make a Copy" before using it. Also, make sure when you share it with your students, you select "view only", otherwise the will be able to edit your original. They can make their own copy and share it with you in order to complete everything.

This is meant to be done in a couple of classes, not just one.

Students date fossils from one site by matching them to fossils already dated somewhere else. They use real data from Mangahouanga, made famous by paleontologist Joan Wiffen.

Students will model carbon dating and how it can be used to determine the age of fossils and other materials. They will use a simple graph to extrapolate data to its starting point.

Students order the events of their morning using relative and absolute dating techniques. Students will also write a personal definition of the terms absolute age and relative age. Next, students will work with collaborative groups to order events in Earth's geologic history by relative age, then order those same events by absolute age in a scaled model timeline. Lastly, students will use the time-scale model created with their group members to analyze events in Earth's geologic history.

Students are introduced to "down-hole logging," a technology used to gather information about seafloor sediments and underwater rock layers. The student pages include sample data logs which students will read and analyze to answer questions about the data.

In this lesson, students will identify patterns in fossils and explain their understanding of how rock layers are deposited. They will use the evidence from the activity to make inferences about what the Earth was like during the time the fossils existed.

Students infer the age of earth materials by ordering rock layers according to relative dating and Law of Superposition and principles of cross-cutting and intrusion.

In this activity, students will work in pairs to make observations about a block of wood in order to deduce the order of events of things that have been done to the block and justify their answers.