We are reading Adventures in the Wilderness by Rutherford Hayes Platt
as our historic inquiry into how the understanding of wilderness has
changed in American history.
Natural history makes every rock rise as sharply in our awareness as a continent. Unfortunately, I never cared much for natural history or geology in school. In fact, I can't even remember who my teachers might have been- only that I had to memorize a bunch of rocks and dates for various tests which seemed much less captivating than all those butterflies swarming around the flower beds outside the classroom window.
So I tried to give Max an "in" and an "out" to our learning adventure. When he lost interest, we moved on. What I didn't anticipate is how long it would take him to lose interest and how many different things we would "accidentally" learn before we finished. After reading, we printed the handouts below and Max used them to answer the worksheets.
GEOLOGICAL TIME PERIODS HANDOUT (PDF)
PREHISTORIC AMERICA WORKSHEET (PDF)
Max and I meandered through various visuals of prehistoric times, including a few online sources which extended the bounds of our imagination and even offered opportunities for cultural critique of how dinosaurs are presented and anthropomorphized. Our online favorites:
Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs for dinos and pop culture
Paleoartistry opens to door to art of paleohistory
Dinner Time Inside a Brachiosaurus, super fun to discuss
The World of Charles R. Knight, which led us to our art work for the day
Charles Robert Knight (1874-1953) was an American artist who took fossil records and brought them to life in magnificent oil paintings depicting what the world looked like millions of years ago. Apparently, the discovery of fossils led to "dinosaur wars" among the artists struggling to depict them.
Carboniferous Landscape by Charles Knight
Our art work of day settled on Charles Knight's depiction of a landscape from the Carboniferous Period in which he used 250 million year old fossils to receare the plant life of those times. Max said, "So ferns made coal?" That seemed like one way to put it.
