finishing our timelines (for now)

We started the week where we left off -- with the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (at least in theory). Above, the boys work on creating a 3-D mixed media meteor Below, they put it up on our wall it the appropriate spot.

We drew some of the major events from 65 million years ago forward, and then identified where on our timeline 65 millions years was -- about half an inch from the end! -- and quickly realized that there would be NO WAY to post up the 9 events we wanted to depict in that one tiny space, nor would there be any way to get a feel for what order they happened in. We needed a new scale! Our Billions of Years scale was just not the right size for what we needed to show.

So we picked a new wall, and painted on a new time line, this one in Millions of Years Ago:

The we took all of our fabulous drawings and put them in the right locations on the timeline:

So here is our finished (for now) timeline, going back to 65 million years ago, and highlighting mammals spreading, the earth being covered in rainforests, whales evolving, the rainforests shrinking, grass spreading, apes evolving, the first early humans, the use of tools, and the taming of fire:

One last field trip (and a large scale timeline), and we'll let timelines rest until the end of the block when we'll create yet another scale timeline for human evolution, and then finally one for recorded history, into which we'll fit all of the cultures we've studied up to this point, and add in those we study in the future.