Big History - Human development - Expansion and interconnection

Big History - Human development - Expansion and interconnection

Lesson 12 of 13 in this unit

  • Primary
  • Year 3 - 6
  • Science
  • Earth and Space
  • Human Endeavour
  • Environmental
  • Land Management
  • Economic
  • Systems Thinking
  • ...

Lesson summary

Students look at inventions across history that improved human’s ability to travel and communicate across the globe, thereby increasing their ability to learn collectively. Students take one example, the bicycle, and look at how its design has improved over the years to enable interconnectedness across communities. 

Learning intentions:

Students will...

  • identify how the world became more interconnected.

Success criteria:

Students can...

  • create a list of technologies that allowed humans to communicate and travel more efficiently and globally
  • explain how collective learning helped improve the design of the bicycle
  • explore how bicycles allow humans to remain interconnected in a sustainable way. 

Lesson guides and printables

Lesson Plan
Student Worksheet
Teacher Content Info

Lesson details

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 fully explained. The best evidence from various disciplines presents the 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 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 into discovering 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, ST2-9PW-ST, ST2-1WS-S,ST2-SPW-STHT2-5GE2-2, GE2-4VAS2-1,VAS2.4

General capabilities: LiteracyDigital LiteracyCritical and Creative Thinking.

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability.

Big History embraces a curriculum that emphasises nature, economics, society and our own well-being to empower children to see our worldview 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.org’s curriculum team continually reviews and refines our resources to be in line with changes to the Australian Curriculum.

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!
Alternatively, the resources for this lesson as a standalone are:

Skills

  • Communication
  • Creativity
  • Critical thinking
  • Digital literacy
  • Global citizenship

Additional info

This is an original Cool+ lesson.

This Big History Program for primary school students is based on the Big History Project as adapted by Marilyn Ahearn and Marisa Colonna. 

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