The Toilet Paper Timeline of Earth History worked as well as I’d hoped. The beginning was a bit boring, it was a challenge keeping the kids focused, since nothing much happens for a very long time. It helped that we had to unroll the toilet paper back and forth across the room, so I had a different student take over every time we had to turn around.
That was not quite enough though to keep them from getting distracted, however, so I also assigned people to stand at the location of major events. This worked out nicely in the end because it let me ask them, at the end, whose event was the most important? Most of them made some argument without any prompting; the group is already pretty comfortable with each other and are not afraid of speaking up.
During the unrolling, most events occur in the final two turns. Students did notice this fact, which is the ultimate point of the exercise. Getting them to talk about different events, like the time of the first multicellular organisms or the extinction of the dinosaurs, helped students own the work. All together, it seemed to strike their imaginations.
They also seem to like using Cartoon History of the Universe as their reading assignment.
This sounds interesting. I do think we will try this. What a simple solution.
I love this activity! It definitely helps give the feel of the long time spans involved. I really appreciate the links in this post and your previous toilet-paper-timeline post. It makes it so much easier when someone has already gone to all the work of figuring out where each date should go on the toilet paper roll. And I like your choice of Cartoon History of the Universe. I featured your photo and dinosaur-related posts at http://livingmontessorinow.com/2011/08/18/montessori-inspired-dinosaur-unit/.
It’s a great exercise. The SERC website (http://serc.carleton.edu/) has a lot of neat activities.
I like the extensive collection of dinosaur related links on your post.