Students explore the history of Planet Earth, Earth’s materials and systems, plate tectonics and large-scale interactions, and the roles of water in Earth’s surface processes.
Download the complete Earth Science – History of Earth framework to customize for your own planning.
Standards
- MS-ESS1-1: Develop and use a model of the Earth-Sun-moon system to describe the cyclic patterns of lunar phases, eclipses of the Sun and moon, and seasons.
- MS-ESS1-2: Develop and use a model to describe the role of gravity in the motions within galaxies and the solar system.
- MS-ESS1-3: Analyze and interpret data to determine scale properties of objects in the solar system.
Essential Questions and Big Ideas of the Unit
- How has our Earth changed over time?
- The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth’s history. Analyses of rock strata and the fossil record provide only relative dates, not an absolute scale. (MS-ESS1-4)
- Tectonic processes continually generate new ocean sea floors at ridges and destroy old seafloors at trenches. (secondary to MS-ESS2-3)
- The planet’s systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years.
- These interactions have shaped Earth’s history and will determine its future. (MS-ESS2-2)
- Maps of ancient land and water patterns, based on investigations of rocks and fossils, make clear how Earth’s plates have moved great distances, collided, and spread apart. (MS-ESS2-3)
- Water’s movements—both on the land and underground—cause weathering and erosion, which change the land’s surface features and create underground formations. (MS-ESS2-2)
Download the complete Earth Science – History of Earth framework to customize for your own planning.