The Second Great Lesson

This week we had the second great lesson: The Coming of Life. This lesson picks up where the Coming of the Universe ends and the conditions are set for life to begin. In the second lesson, we pick up with cyanobacteria – the oldest fossilized life form which is both aquatic and photosynthetic. We decided to put this presentation together with the long black strip. This is a one hundred foot long strip of black fabric with coloured patches for the eras containing life that appear at around 9 o’clock on the Clock of Eras. The eras Precambrian to Cenozoic are materialized in this sensorial presentation. As we tell our story, we unwind the cloth. We use a combination of cards, impressionistic charts, artifacts, interesting objects and samples from life to help the children visualize it. The cataclysms (ice ages, great meteors) are represented as well that began and ended the eras. At the end of the strip appears a tiny 1 cm red line where we place models of human kind (Australopithecus through Homo Sapien) shoulder to shoulder with a basket of artifacts of human industry and then light a match.  Today, as the children looked back over one hundred feet of cloth wound around the gym, they were awed by the short time humans have been on the earth.

We will go into the forest tomorrow to study amphibians with a fresh perspective on the order of adaptations and characteristic changes life made to adapt to environments over time. Hopefully, the children will retain the connections that are made and be inspired to go back into the classroom to follow up their studies.