RE: paleonet Jr High Fossil Activity?

["David Kopaska-Merkel" <davidkm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charlie Smith does a fun exercise about Cretaceous chalk, beginning with a sugar cube. He shows pictures of nannofossils, and asks students to guess how many would occupy the volume of a sugar cube. They're usually off by many orders of magnitude, and he then goes through the calculation to get an accurate estimate. Older kids could do the calculations, and you could demonstrate on the board for younger kids.

 

David C. Kopaska-Merkel
Geological Survey of Alabama
P.O. Box 869999
Tuscaloosa AL 35486-6999
(205) 349-2852
fax 349-2861
www.gsa.state.al.us

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-----Original Message-----
From: paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk [mailto:paleonet-owner@nhm.ac.uk]On Behalf Of Jere H. Lipps
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 1:16 PM
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Subject: Re: paleonet Jr High Fossil Activity?

Check out the UCMP web site at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/museum/k-12.html for activities, especially the on-line book "Learning from the fossil record".  One of the amazing things I learned from that exercise was that teachers and students about the age you note were transfixed by microfossils.  If you have some microscopes and some disaggregated sediment, you can keep them busy exploring for at least 1/2 hour, maybe the full 50 minutes.

Jere Lipps