Also on Friday...

We had a very busy day on Friday!  After our Councillors had been we then had a workshop from Dynamic Earth as part of the Science Festival.  We were given the chance to learn about their current exhibition 'Time Lords' which looks at how old Planet Earth is and how we know.

 We started off by using some resources to try and work out how old the Earth is.  We had to give reasons why our resources would be helpful in working this out.

After that we  looked at some of the 'Time Lords' theories.  We first explored the idea that dirt from the mountains is washed down into the sea and then layers of dirt build up on the sea bed. Over time these layers are compressed and turn into rock.  This rock is then pushed back up to form new mountains.  This process helped to work out the age of the Earth by working our how long new mountains took to form.

 We used play-dough to show this happening.  Flat layers building on top of each other, being pushed up to form new mountains, dirt being washed back into the sea (erosion) and new layers forming on top.

Finally we looked at some rocks and using information cards we were able to name and date our piece of rock.  Some rocks dated back billions of years!

We created a time line showing the earliest rock to the most recent.  We also added in a few extra time zones to help us make sense of the time scale.

Thank you Dynamic Earth for working with us!