A Wonderful Student-Paced Lesson on Geologic Time for Grades 5-10 https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/explorations/tours/geotime/index.html
No Prerequisites Needed and Teacher’s Guide Available.
During this tour, students will learn:
- that the Earth has a very long history;
- about some of the events that have taken place during Earth’s history;
- how scientists use the Law of Superposition to determine the relative age of rocks and fossils;
- how scientists use radiometric dating to determine the absolute age of rocks and fossils;
- that the Geologic Time Scale is a vertical timeline representing the history of the Earth; and
- how the Geologic Time Scale is arranged into periods of time based on major changes in biodiversity.

Stories From The Fossil Record (Grades 5-9) has 4 stories: Biodiversity, Paleoecology, Past Lives, and Geologic Time.
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/education/explorations/tours/stories/middle/intro.html
Prerequisites to these lessons are the knowledge of what a fossil is and how fossils are formed. See In The Classroom page for other “stories”.
In the Geologic Time story, students will learn that:
- the position of layers of rocks and fossils tell us about their relative ages (superposition).
- fossils found in only one particular layer of rock all over the world are called index fossils.
- index fossils can help us establish the age of rock layers in different parts of the world.
- fossils help us learn about past geologic events such as the formation of mountains and the movement of continents.
