Activity Introduction
Quick summary: Students explore a timeline of human evolution and the role of archaeologists in discovering this information. They conduct an experiment that demonstrates the usefulness of opposable thumbs as an evolutionary step.
Subjects: Science, English, HASS
Year Level: Primary
Topics: The Big Bang, History
Teaching Time: 60 mins.
Unit: This is Lesson 9 of the Big History – Primary unit.
For more information on how to teach this unit and develop a transdisciplinary approach to your teaching, check out our Big History PD.
This Big History Program for primary school students is based on the Big History Project as adapted by Marilyn Ahearn and Marisa Colonna. Click here to view these lessons in their far more expansive original format.
Resources Required:
You may decide on different entrances to this story in your classroom. That is perfectly reasonable – as long as we tell the whole emerging story of our universe, as we know it! Think of the story as a chapter book where children need to hear the whole story to make sense of it – if we hear fragments from various chapters we are left with fragments once more!
Therefore, we strongly recommend you teach this unit as a whole from start to finish. You can find all of the Presentation Slides, Teacher Worksheets, Student Worksheets, and other required resources for download in this folder.
Alternatively, the resources for this lesson as a standalone are:
- A device capable of presenting a video to the class
- Big History Passport
- Independent devices capable of accessing the internet – one per student (optional)
- Masking tape
- Plastic bottle with cap, empty – one per pair
- Presentation Slides
- Straws – one per pair
- Threshold Cards – Specifically the cards for Thresholds 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5
21st-Century Skills:
Level of teacher scaffolding: High – Facilitate explicit teaching and guide students through independent work.
Australian Curriculum Mapping
“It is one of the many odd features of modern society, that despite having access to more information than any earlier society, those in modern educational systems … teach about (our) origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be, the way they are.” – David Christian, 2011, Maps of time: an introduction to big history
We encourage you to teach Big History both through and in-between disciplines (transdisciplinary)
The story of our universe needs the expertise of academic disciplines to be made sense of and explained in full. The best evidence from a wide range of disciplines presents the current best answers to our big questions.
As primary educators, this provides us in turn with the opportunity to engage with this story from a particular perspective that your grade and/or school currently requires. This means that it is not seen as an add-on/extracurricular activity that our overloaded timetables cannot cope with. English, Science, & Creative Arts syllabuses easily incorporate Big History, alongside the skills and concepts from History and Geography. Maths, too, can be incorporated in the discovery of large numbers and measuring the large scales of time and space!
Syllabus outcomes: EN2-1A, EN2-2A, EN2-4A, EN2-6B, EN2-7B, EN2-8B, EN2-10C, EN2-11D, EN2-12E, ST2-4LW-S, ST2-9PW-ST, ST2-1WS-S,ST2-SPW-ST, HT2-5, GE2-1, GES2-2, GE2-4, VAS2-1,VAS2.4
General capabilities: Literacy, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Capability, Critical and Creative Thinking.
Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability.
Big History embraces a curriculum that emphasises nature, economics, society and our own wellbeing to empower children to see our world view from the context of a unified universe story, not merely from within our local cultural worldview!
Learning our emerging and unified 13.82 billion years of Big History helps us to understand the changing nature and fragility of our complex environment. We can use that knowledge of the past, present and future to investigate future possibilities for sustainable ways to meet our own needs and the needs of future generations.
Cool Australia’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.
